You're thinking about the Orion project, which was proposed in the 70s. It was quietly dropped, and I think it's safe to say that it will never come about, given humanity's disillusionment with nuclear bombs. Not to mention the impracticality of the design, compared to the alternatives.
Most of them are probably running Windows, so the distinction isn't moot unless some concrete figures are offered. It may well be that there are more Sun servers out there than Apple desktop systems; I wouldn't be surprised.
Once biometric, SSN-linked driver's licenses are in place, we'll be on the slippery slope and ready to roll.
As you helpfully point out, your argument is known as a slippery slope argument, a classic error. The mistake is that the introduction of a national identity card does not imply the apocalyptic consequences you describe.
I think I see that my analogy was imprecise. I'm obviously not an astrophysicist.
However, I'm not entirely clear about the difference between the two processes. By "scattering" I assume you are referring to the interaction of the photons and the electrons in the atoms. Is this right? If I shine some photons into a jar of air (where the molecules are not ordered) these interactions manifest as a classical index of refraction. Which of the two phenomena would this correspond to?
Three dates, actually - the last big (naked-eye) supernova was in 1987. That was what made these neutrino observatories famous. IIRC, teams working at two different sites each detected a big burst of neutrinos, almost three hours before the supernova was sighted.
(No, neutrinos can't travel faster than the speed of light, just very close to it. The neutrinos produced by the core of the collapsing star escape easily through the stellar atmosphere since they interact weakly with matter, whereas the light took significantly longer to escape - think of how light travels more slowly in a block of glass. So the neutrinos reached us first.)
It was all tremendously exciting stuff, as you might imagine. Unbelievable serendipity.
Oh, and in case anyone is misled... the neutrino observatories are assuredly NOT there to catch supernovae. They mostly detect neutrinos coming from the Sun, which are produced during the solar fusion process. The data from Super-K and SNO is shedding light on some problems in solar physics and elementary particle physics.
I doubt any grad student is patient enough to work on an experiment that gets one event every five hundred years.
...leaving the world far less capable of observing the next supernova neutrino burst, should it arrive before repairs or a replacement could be completed.
While the accident is a tragic blow to some valid and interesting research, no one should lose any sleep over the possibility of being unable to analyze the next big supernova before it can be repaired. After all, supernovae on the scale of SN1987A occur once every few hundred years (the last two occurred in 1054 and 1572.) I suspect repairing Super-K will take significantly faster than that.
Even in the minuscule chance that a big supernova will occur in the meantime, Super-K isn't the only neutrino observatory around. The Sudsbury Neutrino Observatory, a similar experiment, is online and producing some very good results.
IMHO SourceForge is the most dynamic idea-platform for parsecs around, if not in the known universe.
Beginning this remarkable feat of hyperbole, this post sent my bullshit-o-meter off the scale.
What kind of fucked up moderator thinks this stuff is "insightful"? Is it because he has a project on Sourceforge and uses important-sounding words? Because he has more than two links in his post? Or is any and every post in favor of Sourceforge scheduled to be modded up, no matter how kooky?
Ye gods, follow his links. This guy's "Lebenswerk, or life-work" is apparently coding a full artificial intelligence. In Javascript. Ooookay. The interview and the "Theory of Mind" paper on his Sourceforge page (follow his links!) aren't the most floridly elaborate piece of pseudoscience I've ever read, but it comes close.
From what I gather reading the mailing lists, GCC 3.0 was a features release, and 3.0.x were bugfix releases. There is generally very little performance benefit over 2.9.x (and the occasional performance regression.)
GCC 3.1 will focus on optimization, building on the new infrastructure implemented with 3.0. If you're brave enough, you can pull from CVS and try it out for yourself.
I have to recommend the 32S II. I have that and the 48GX (both RPN calculators.) The 48GX is big, with every bell and whistle you would ever want in a calculator, and is priced to match - over $170 at Fry's. It usually sits on my desk, being too bulky to carry around.
The 32SII is about $50, and is simply a marvel. It's small enough to fit in my pocket, and is programmable! I carry it everywhere. The only quibble I have with it is the four element stack (there are some tricks you can use with short stacks, but I'm not enough of an RPN wizard to employ them.)
If you want to get a HP calculator, by all means get an RPN one. It's a very efficient system, even if it takes some getting used to (GNU Calc is a great HP calculator emulator, you might want to check it out first.)
Re:Why use Netscape anyway?
on
Netscape 6.2
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· Score: 1
There are plenty of great browsers out there, Mozilla, Konquerer, IE, Opera, and sever others. Why would anyone stop using their browser of choice and use Netscape? I mean, it's not really that good anyway.
Now this is why I read Slashdot: the incisive wit and brilliant reasoning.
I have been a Netscape user, but the cool, irrefutable logic of this post has shown me the error of my ways. After all, it has been moderated "Insightful," so Netscape really must be "not really that good anyway." I'll go wipe it from my hard disk, and switch to the "sever other" great browsers out there.
Re:Debian packages
on
GNU Emacs 21
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· Score: 3, Informative
Kitame's page was one of the major sources of "leaked" Emacs 21 during the pretest. (Someone wryly referred to it as "GPL warez", as I recall.) He eventually removed the pretest debs, but I used them happily for many months. Thanks, Kitame!
Re:emacs history, direction ?
on
GNU Emacs 21
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· Score: 1
Emacs is a class of editors with similar properties (programmable, use of modifier keys to launch editor commands, and so forth.) It can also refer to GNU Emacs, one of the most powerful and widely-used implementations of Emacs today, which is what this story is about.
Emacs is one of the two most popular types of editor in Unix, the other being vi. Befitting its long history, it is very stable and functional, though lacking in the eye-candy of more recent software (though this release goes a long way to correcting that.)
The sources of information on Emacs is the GNU Emacs homepage, especially the on-line version of the Manual. The best way to learn about Emacs, as with any software, is simply to install it and try it out for yourself.
As always, the best source of information on the features of a new release is the Anti-News in the (excellently written) Emacs Manual, which should come bundled with each installation. It's provided to prepare "those users who live backwards in time" for Emacs version 20, and is great fun. A sample:
Emacs now provides its own "lean and mean" scroll bars instead of using those from the X toolkit. Toggle buttons and radio buttons in menus now look just like any other menu item, which simplifies them, and prevents them from standing out and distracting your attention from the other menu items.
The arrangement of menu bar items differs from most other GUI programs. We think that uniformity of look-and-feel is boring, and that Emacs' unique features require its unique menu-bar configuration.
Emacs 20 does not pop up a buffer with error messages when an error is signaled during loading of the user's init file. Instead, it simply announces the fact that an error happened. To know where in the init file that was, insert `(message "foo")' lines judiciously into the file and look for those messages in the `*Messages*' buffer.
Some commands no longer treat Transient Mark mode specially. For example, `ispell' doesn't spell-check the region when Transient Mark mode is in effect and the mark is active; instead, it checks the current buffer. (Transient Mark mode is alien to the spirit of Emacs, so we are planning to remove it altogether in an earlier version.)
Many complicated display features, including highlighting of mouse-sensitive text regions and popping up help strings for menu items, don't work in the MS-DOS version. Spelling doesn't work on MS-DOS, and Eshell doesn't exist, so there's no workable shell-mode, either. This fits the spirit of MS-DOS, which resembles a dumb character terminal.
The `woman' package has been removed, so Emacs users on non-Posix systems will need _a real man_ to read manual pages. (Users who are not macho can read the Info documentation instead.)
To keep up with decreasing computer memory capacity and disk space, many other functions and files have been eliminated in Emacs 20.
Emacs 21 annoyances
on
GNU Emacs 21
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· Score: 4, Informative
Some of the new features of Emacs 21 will annoy those of us who are just too used to the old Emacs 20 interface. The following code will turn off the more "newbie-friendly" changes:
That said, a ton of the new features are very cool. The News file is gigantic... the new features I particularly like are mouse-avoidance mode, the scalable mini-windows, mouse-popup-menubar-stuff, flyspell-mode, cursor-type, and auto-image-file-mode. Have fun!
No, you're missing the point:-) The OP noted that a black hole has the same gravity as anything with an equivalent mass. But that's certainly not the reason we're not worried about making a black hole on Earth!
I'm well aware of the stability issue; if you read my post again, you'll notice I mentioned it.
You're missing the point. The particle colliders are located on Earth, so if one manufactures a black hole, the consequences would be Not Good.
That is to say, the black hole would punch a hole into the ground, and start oscillating about the center of the Earth. It'll eat up all the matter in its path, and keep growing. We'll have some fun with earthquakes, volcano eruptions, etc. before the end of the world finally arrives.
Of course, the fact that we aren't likely to manufacture such a stable black hole is that it hasn't already occured, as the article points out.
Slashdot Mirror
You're thinking about the Orion project, which was proposed in the 70s. It was quietly dropped, and I think it's safe to say that it will never come about, given humanity's disillusionment with nuclear bombs. Not to mention the impracticality of the design, compared to the alternatives.
Most of them are probably running Windows, so the distinction isn't moot unless some concrete figures are offered. It may well be that there are more Sun servers out there than Apple desktop systems; I wouldn't be surprised.
I'm sorry, were we talking about the desktop market?
From the original post:
right now Apple is the world's leading supplier of Unixish systems thanks to the miracle of OS X
No mention of that.
It seems that Kaffe's latest release was July 25, 2000. Not exactly active development, is it?
Doesn't that title belong to Sun?
As you helpfully point out, your argument is known as a slippery slope argument, a classic error. The mistake is that the introduction of a national identity card does not imply the apocalyptic consequences you describe.
On the other hand, testing the equivalence principle is not the same as testing GR...
Huh? Does the program use your monitor to produce a radio program about psychotherapy? How do you describe your problems to it?
I think I see that my analogy was imprecise. I'm obviously not an astrophysicist.
However, I'm not entirely clear about the difference between the two processes. By "scattering" I assume you are referring to the interaction of the photons and the electrons in the atoms. Is this right? If I shine some photons into a jar of air (where the molecules are not ordered) these interactions manifest as a classical index of refraction. Which of the two phenomena would this correspond to?
So photons have to "work" themselves via random scattering.
In other words, by interacting with matter. Forgive me, but I don't quite see what you're correcting.
(No, neutrinos can't travel faster than the speed of light, just very close to it. The neutrinos produced by the core of the collapsing star escape easily through the stellar atmosphere since they interact weakly with matter, whereas the light took significantly longer to escape - think of how light travels more slowly in a block of glass. So the neutrinos reached us first.)
It was all tremendously exciting stuff, as you might imagine. Unbelievable serendipity.
Oh, and in case anyone is misled... the neutrino observatories are assuredly NOT there to catch supernovae. They mostly detect neutrinos coming from the Sun, which are produced during the solar fusion process. The data from Super-K and SNO is shedding light on some problems in solar physics and elementary particle physics.
I doubt any grad student is patient enough to work on an experiment that gets one event every five hundred years.
While the accident is a tragic blow to some valid and interesting research, no one should lose any sleep over the possibility of being unable to analyze the next big supernova before it can be repaired. After all, supernovae on the scale of SN1987A occur once every few hundred years (the last two occurred in 1054 and 1572.) I suspect repairing Super-K will take significantly faster than that.
Even in the minuscule chance that a big supernova will occur in the meantime, Super-K isn't the only neutrino observatory around. The Sudsbury Neutrino Observatory, a similar experiment, is online and producing some very good results.
IMHO SourceForge is the most dynamic idea-platform for parsecs around, if not in the known universe.
Beginning this remarkable feat of hyperbole, this post sent my bullshit-o-meter off the scale.
What kind of fucked up moderator thinks this stuff is "insightful"? Is it because he has a project on Sourceforge and uses important-sounding words? Because he has more than two links in his post? Or is any and every post in favor of Sourceforge scheduled to be modded up, no matter how kooky?
Ye gods, follow his links. This guy's "Lebenswerk, or life-work" is apparently coding a full artificial intelligence. In Javascript. Ooookay. The interview and the "Theory of Mind" paper on his Sourceforge page (follow his links!) aren't the most floridly elaborate piece of pseudoscience I've ever read, but it comes close.
From what I gather reading the mailing lists, GCC 3.0 was a features release, and 3.0.x were bugfix releases. There is generally very little performance benefit over 2.9.x (and the occasional performance regression.)
GCC 3.1 will focus on optimization, building on the new infrastructure implemented with 3.0. If you're brave enough, you can pull from CVS and try it out for yourself.
I have to recommend the 32S II. I have that and the 48GX (both RPN calculators.) The 48GX is big, with every bell and whistle you would ever want in a calculator, and is priced to match - over $170 at Fry's. It usually sits on my desk, being too bulky to carry around.
The 32SII is about $50, and is simply a marvel. It's small enough to fit in my pocket, and is programmable! I carry it everywhere. The only quibble I have with it is the four element stack (there are some tricks you can use with short stacks, but I'm not enough of an RPN wizard to employ them.)
If you want to get a HP calculator, by all means get an RPN one. It's a very efficient system, even if it takes some getting used to (GNU Calc is a great HP calculator emulator, you might want to check it out first.)
There are plenty of great browsers out there, Mozilla, Konquerer, IE, Opera, and sever others. Why would anyone stop using their browser of choice and use Netscape? I mean, it's not really that good anyway.
Now this is why I read Slashdot: the incisive wit and brilliant reasoning.
I have been a Netscape user, but the cool, irrefutable logic of this post has shown me the error of my ways. After all, it has been moderated "Insightful," so Netscape really must be "not really that good anyway." I'll go wipe it from my hard disk, and switch to the "sever other" great browsers out there.
Takuo Kitame has put up test packages here.
Kitame's page was one of the major sources of "leaked" Emacs 21 during the pretest. (Someone wryly referred to it as "GPL warez", as I recall.) He eventually removed the pretest debs, but I used them happily for many months. Thanks, Kitame!
Emacs is a class of editors with similar properties (programmable, use of modifier keys to launch editor commands, and so forth.) It can also refer to GNU Emacs, one of the most powerful and widely-used implementations of Emacs today, which is what this story is about.
Emacs is one of the two most popular types of editor in Unix, the other being vi. Befitting its long history, it is very stable and functional, though lacking in the eye-candy of more recent software (though this release goes a long way to correcting that.)
The sources of information on Emacs is the GNU Emacs homepage, especially the on-line version of the Manual. The best way to learn about Emacs, as with any software, is simply to install it and try it out for yourself.
As always, the best source of information on the features of a new release is the Anti-News in the (excellently written) Emacs Manual, which should come bundled with each installation. It's provided to prepare "those users who live backwards in time" for Emacs version 20, and is great fun. A sample:
There's also Programming in Emacs Lisp, an Introduction[gnu.org], a GNU manual.
Some of the new features of Emacs 21 will annoy those of us who are just too used to the old Emacs 20 interface. The following code will turn off the more "newbie-friendly" changes:
(setq emacs21 (eq emacs-major-version 21))
(when emacs21
(blink-cursor-mode -1)
(tool-bar-mode -1)
(tooltip-mode -1)
(global-set-key [home] 'beginning-of-buffer)
(global-set-key [end] 'end-of-buffer)
(setq rmail-confirm-expunge nil))
That said, a ton of the new features are very cool. The News file is gigantic... the new features I particularly like are mouse-avoidance mode, the scalable mini-windows, mouse-popup-menubar-stuff, flyspell-mode, cursor-type, and auto-image-file-mode. Have fun!
Right on. panel + sawfish + xscreensaver fits all my needs.
No, you're missing the point :-) The OP noted that a black hole has the same gravity as anything with an equivalent mass. But that's certainly not the reason we're not worried about making a black hole on Earth!
I'm well aware of the stability issue; if you read my post again, you'll notice I mentioned it.
You're missing the point. The particle colliders are located on Earth, so if one manufactures a black hole, the consequences would be Not Good.
That is to say, the black hole would punch a hole into the ground, and start oscillating about the center of the Earth. It'll eat up all the matter in its path, and keep growing. We'll have some fun with earthquakes, volcano eruptions, etc. before the end of the world finally arrives.
Of course, the fact that we aren't likely to manufacture such a stable black hole is that it hasn't already occured, as the article points out.