Sadly true. The thing about terrorism is that there is no way the terrorists can't win. Any security can be circumvented. So we protect against any given types of attacks, what's to prevent them from using a different means. I could drive my pickup truck head-on into a school-bus this afternoon and nobody could stop me. (trust me, I won't) What are we going to do about that possible terrorist threat, build seperate roads for school busses to travel on? Yes, that's a bad examble, but the point is the same. That's why Bin Laden won the war on terrism the moment his pawns rammed those planes into the WTC and the Pentagon. America changed at that point. Americans became more paranoid. The government got an excuse to impose pretty much anything they want. Tilting at windmills in the guise of increasing security. But what else could have happened? We couldn't just pretend that nothing happened. If we'd have done that, that plane that dropped in Pennsylvania would have hit its target.
America is changing, and you're right... one day we'll wake up and realise it is no longer the USA. Maybe one day we'll wake up and this will all be a bad dream, but that possibility is so remote as to be, well, a dream. The reality of the future is starting to settle in around us and it all seems so...
First off, I think your 95% of forest is gone is incorrect, as others have pointed out. But more to the point, the poster you quoted appears, at least to me, to be talking more about the resources of the earth itself, under the surface...metals, fossil fuels, what-have-you. The earth is thousands of miles in diameter, and we've only scratched the top mile or two.
Not that we shouldn't be careful. I dislike smog and appreciate trees as much as the next guy. We need to be conservative of our resources, but we're by no means close to exhausting the earth's resources.
Doesn't anybody else find it at least slightly funny that someone is proposing putting a Quantum Afterburner (TM) on a piston engine, the essential design of which is 125 years old? After all, there are other ways to recover waste heat in the exhaust that we could be using now, but aren't. Peltier junctions could be used to generate electricity to supplement or replace the function of the alternator once the engine was hot. Someone else here mentioned stirling engines. Maybe that'd be another way to increase the efficiency. Again, maybe you could drive the alternator with it. Of course, the alternator only uses maybe 1 or 2 horsepower anyway, so even eliminating that drag on the engine is only going to be a small improvement.
Than again... how many horsepower does a car use when cruising? Maybe eliminating 1 or 2 horsepower would make a difference. I would assume that this Quantum Afterburner (TM) would be able to recover a much greater amount of the waste heat, too, so maybe it would make quite a difference.
P.S. -- before anybody starts to rant on me for using horsepower, remember, there are metric horsepower too! According to my unit converter, one horsepower equals 1.01387 metric horsepower. Guess the French have different sized horses than the English! Cheers!
I agree with you on that. The text isn't attempting to be scientifically accurate. After all cubits and handsbreaths are hardly even fixed measures. Using such a text to discredit the Bible is a rather lame attempt. Sort of like in modern journalism they will often say things like "X is as long as three football fields". That's fine... the average person in their audience automatically has a good idea of just how long X is. They aren't trying to be exact, there's no point. I think it's just a matter of what is intended (an approximation) and, as you say, significant digits.
Thank you. I also read the Reuters article, and you're right... they are reporting the story, that's it. Some guy claims to have invented a machine that makes free energy. Seems to me like something a newspaper should report. Reuters isn't saying the guy is right or wrong, however, they do seem to cast doubt on it. I have my own serious doubts that this guy is right, but most/. posts thus far have been by people who have obviously not even read the article. Reuters isn't at fault here. They reported the news. Now, it's fully open for debate as to whether or not this Jasker guy is a crackpot. Of course, this is/., so I fully expect people to speak with their minds turned off.
Might explain that mysterious force that is accelerating everything outward around here. Maybe that accelerating force is the outer shell of the gravistar. _IF_ our observable universe is indeed inside one of these gravistars... imagine... there's an entire "something" outside that is completely and totally unobservable from inside. Not that that's necessarily any different than now, there are plenty of things that are unobservable, it's just that the traditional thought has been (at least for me) that the universe either dwindled away to nothingness at some point, or continued on with more stars, galaxies, and stuff forever. This idea implies that there's a solid outer wall to the universe. Or not. But it's fun to speculate...
The springboard was a marvelous idea. The biggest selling point in my book being plug-and-play that actually worked. All software is on the card, and the Visor recognizes it instantly. Witness the Sony Clie's memory-stick camera. Note on their web site says that it only works after loading the software on seperately. That's a shame, because with the Springboard, it's 100% automatic. In the end, I think most people were like me and thought they were cool but couldn't fork over the money.
First, you're right about the springboard slot, in a way. There are lots of modules available for it, then again they're a little pricey. On the other hand, Sony has a camera is supposedly will have a GPS module soon, for the memory stick slot.
Okay, so what really makes this thing tempting? 320x320 color screen. Compare that to 160x160 for the Visor Prism or the color Palms. Throw in Documents-to-Go, which is included with the Sony. It'll cost you $70 at PalmGear. Throw in an enhanced IR port, which I take it would compare to the Handspring OmniRemote module ($60 from Handspring). So right there is $130 in add-ons that are included with the Clie, already making it a better deal than the Prism.
Also, looks like the best price for a SpringBoard 16MB memory card is about $80. For that you can get a 64MB memory stick.
One last thing: Click on the product tour for the Clie. First pic is a side shot of the Clie. Yep, it's thin.
Now, I'm not necessarily sold on this Clie. I'm currently the proud owner of a Visor Deluxe, which I've had for a couple of years now. But it cost me $300 originally, so $400 for 4x the resolution, plus color, plus style, plus whatever else seems to me to be right on the money.
Now, I have a birthday coming up... I wonder if I can convince my wife how much I NEED a new PDA...
USB Cradle $50 bucks
AC Adapter $30 bucks
Stylus 3 Pack $15 bucks
Doesn't seem too bad...
Also, only compatible with Sony software? It runs the PalmOS, which means it's compatible with the largest selection of software available for any PDA.
Well, at least they're told you they're going to build a road through your house and you didn't wake up this morning to a big yellow bulldozer outside your kitchen window.:)
But your post is right on. Storing nuclear waste in Yucca Mountain is the least-risky route. Launching the stuff to space would be cool, and would certainly rid us of the stuff, but one disaster...
Trucking it to Nevada and burying it under the desert is simply the best option. It would certainly be safe from "terrorists", as I imagine they'd never get past the security, and if they did, they'd die pretty quickly once they got underground with the stuff.
Maybe someday we'll have an abundant source of power that doesn't produce toxic waste, but for now, we're stuck with fossil fuels or nuclear fission. Myself, I like nuclear fission, because all the waste is contained. Nuclear fusion would be wonderful, but that's been 10 years away for the last 50 years. Beaming power down from satellites definitly has the geek factor, but seems to be way to obvious a target for sabotage.
First off, they don't say it can compress "random data", they say it can compress "practically random data", which I would take to be everyday sort of data like audio and video. And they don't say that data can be compressed infinitely. _If_ whatever they have does work, I suspect it'll be an enlightening moment for the rest of us if/when they release the details of their algorithm. Sort of like, if the only thing you're familiar with is the bubble sort, quick-sort is almost magical. Well, maybe the current schemes of run-length-encoding, and whatever other pattern matching we do, is akin to the bubble sort and these guys have put their heads together and created the quick-sort of data compression.
I'm not calling it either way, but all the "It can't be done! The world is flat!" comments are so typically... well... slashdot.
Re:If this was a regular PC company...
on
New iMac Announced
·
· Score: 2
I think the difference isn't that you _can't_ do everything the new iMac can do with a PC, just that it's not standard in most PC's, and you definitely can't match the footprint. This new iMac is the sort of device you can give your grandma, along with a video camera with firewire output and she can start sending you DVD's of the local Bingo night. Nobody's doing anything in the computer business that's exclusively theirs, but Apple has been doing a very good job as of late in packaging things nicely. If I was in the market for a computer right now, I'd have to look at this new iMac. It'd definitely look nicer in the corner of my dining room (only place I've got for a computer right now) than my current beige box PC.
Don't you think it's kinda funny that MS tried this with NT? Granted, it was miles beyond 9x (and it originally came out before 9x, go figure) but, still, dropping out to a console and kill -9 is much more effective than trying to kill a process in NT (Ctrl-Alt-Del, open task manager, select end task, repeat until it works.) Of course, you mentioned restarting the gui without killing off the apps, which unix & linux can do, but obviously Windows cannot. Maybe Lindows will pull through. I would consider it one of the wonders of the world if anybody can make a system that can run windows EXE's and Linux ELF's side-by-side with no problems and no performance hit, which is what Lindows is claiming. More power to them!
The article clearly indicates that the maglev is going to provide an initial boost, not the full velocity required to reach orbit. Given that rockets use a large portion of their fuel before clearing the tower (a quarter/half of their fuel, something like that), it would be beneficial to use a maglev to get the craft moving before kicking in the rocket. I would envision they would go a step further and combine it with a scram jet. The scram jet won't work until it's super-sonic, so why not launch it super-sonic from the maglev, kick in the scram jet to the edge of the atmosphere, and then finally open up the liquid oxygen. Seems to me they'd save a tremendous amount of weight. You'd still save a lot of weight even if you leave out the scram jet.
The point is that I have no need to figure--in my head--that if you run me through a blender (which I suspect you'd like to do right now) that I'd fit into a typical milk crate. Actually, I'd probably run out a bit...
I know it's X miles from town A to town B. Fine, I have no need to know that in feet, furlongs, nautical miles or ki-LOM-eters:). If I do, the conversions are easy enough.
I know that, rounded to the nearest foot, I'm 6' tall. Closer than you'll get rounding to the nearest meter. Again, no need to convert to inches, hands or miles.
I know that my toilet uses (or is supposed to use) 1.2 gallons per flush. No need to convert to teaspoons, pints, quarts (though that's pretty obvious...) or liters (though that's also stated on the label).
I don't know right off the top of my head the mean distance from earth to the sun in miles or kilometers, but I do know that it is 1 AU, which seems to fit the English system of making the units fit the world rather than the other way around. Oh, I just did the conversion of 1AU to miles and km. 9.300e+7 miles or 1.496e+8 km. I have no need to know this in inches, furlongs, nautical miles, or light-years.
Made my point, right? English measurements are size appropriately to the things measured. There is normally no need to convert between said measures, and if needed, it is easily accomplished.
you're probably right that it's what you're used to, but my point is that the arbitrary English units are plenty fine, thank you. The primary benefit of metric is that everything converts nicely. Granted. I don't have a need to go converting inches to furlongs everyday, and if I do, I'm sure I can find the conversion rate somewhere.
I guess it's just an American independence thing then... we don't want the French telling us what system of measurement to use.:)
As far as KILO-meter (or metre, for you French) vs ki-LOM-eter, I guess it just sounds better. Probably related to spe-DOM-eter rather than SPEED-O-meter.;) (o-DOM-eter, not O-DO-meter) Actually, since ki-LOM-eters come from France, and many accents in French are on the second syllable, I guess is makes sense! Parle vous FranCAISE? (sorry for the missing accent marks, and stuff...)
Have a great day! And, hey, we're just having fun here, right?
People who age more slowly will have more children? What are you smoking? (Sorry to flame you, but I though you had already lit up...) The number of children one has nowadays is almost 100% related to personal choice. (well, it always has been, but now avoiding sex isn't the choice; birth control is.) If a woman wants to have 2 kids (or 1 or 4, whatever) and has her tubes tied after that, it doesn't matter how slowly she ages, or how long she would have been fertile (without having her tubes tied), she's not likely to have more kids. You're theory MIGHT work for, say, cattle, which are pretty much going to have a calf once a year from the time they are able until they aren't, as long as a bull is in the same pasture with them. People have more choice than that, and I think the evolutionary tact there isn't going to work.
I wish people would stop banging on the English units. Use metric if you want and leave the rest of us alone! I'm either 5'11" (say, roughly 6') tall or 180.34cm. Now, which of those gives you a better mental picture of how tall I am? For scientific things, yes, powers of 10 work out real nice and all, but for everyday things, who the heck cares if you have to remember there's 12 inches in a foot... not that hard! The English units make a LOT more sense in everyday sorts of things. And, by the way, bushels of cotton per ACRE makes a lot of sense if you're raising cotton. Does metric even have "dry volume" measurements? I guess we could go with HECTOLITERS OF COTTON PER HECTARE? If my math is right, 1 bushel per acre works out to 0.8705 hectoliters per hectare.
I suppose the CORRECT figures for NASA should have been a goal of 2.58 EUROS per GRAM! (Assuming an exchange rate of 1 EURO = $0.85, which is close.)
That's not it. Because of their algorithm, order doesn't matter, and neither do dropped packets. The receiver only needs any n packets, so the transmitter keeps sending until the receiver says it got enough. Then the results are magically XORed to get the original file. So, no, you don't need a sequential number, you don't need to check if all packets arrived, and you don't have to rearrange them.
It looks to me like they don't care if packets get dropped. The sender just keeps jamming stuff down the pipe until the receiver gets enough. Yeah, seems to me they need some kind of flow control, and I definitely think it'd be a bandwidth hog.
There have been lots of comments along the lines of, "this is just a novel compression/transmittion scheme". In a way, that looks to be true, but here's my take.
Judging from this:
The sending side transmits these symbols until the box on the receiving end confirms that it's collected enough symbols. The receiving box then performs an XOR operation on the symbols to derive the original data.
It appears to me that the transmitting side generates the symbols (parameters of the equations, I guess) and begins sending them to the receiving side as fast as it can. Apparently there are multiple solutions to the equations that will arrive at the same answer, so when the receiving end has received enough symbols to make it works it says, "stop sending already!" Apparently they're getting their speed because A) things don't have to go in any order (that's how the 'net is supposed to work, right?) and B) Alice and Bob don't have to keep up this conversation: Alice: Hey, Bob, can you send me X? Bob: Okay, are you ready? A: Yes, Go ahead? B: Okay, here it comes. A: I'm waiting. B: Here's the first packet." A: What? That packet didn't make it over. B: Okay, here it is again. A: Okay, I got that packet. B: Good. A: Okay, I'm ready for the second packet. B: Okay, here's the second packet.
Okay, I had too much fun with the Alice and Bob conversation there. Anyway, it looks like there scheme is compressing things in the form of their equations, and then just sending them in a burst until the receiver is happy.
Sounds like it might work, but it'll generate a ton of network traffic, I'd bet!
Slashdot Mirror
Sadly true. The thing about terrorism is that there is no way the terrorists can't win. Any security can be circumvented. So we protect against any given types of attacks, what's to prevent them from using a different means. I could drive my pickup truck head-on into a school-bus this afternoon and nobody could stop me. (trust me, I won't) What are we going to do about that possible terrorist threat, build seperate roads for school busses to travel on? Yes, that's a bad examble, but the point is the same. That's why Bin Laden won the war on terrism the moment his pawns rammed those planes into the WTC and the Pentagon. America changed at that point. Americans became more paranoid. The government got an excuse to impose pretty much anything they want. Tilting at windmills in the guise of increasing security. But what else could have happened? We couldn't just pretend that nothing happened. If we'd have done that, that plane that dropped in Pennsylvania would have hit its target.
America is changing, and you're right... one day we'll wake up and realise it is no longer the USA. Maybe one day we'll wake up and this will all be a bad dream, but that possibility is so remote as to be, well, a dream. The reality of the future is starting to settle in around us and it all seems so...
inevitable.
First off, I think your 95% of forest is gone is incorrect, as others have pointed out. But more to the point, the poster you quoted appears, at least to me, to be talking more about the resources of the earth itself, under the surface...metals, fossil fuels, what-have-you. The earth is thousands of miles in diameter, and we've only scratched the top mile or two.
Not that we shouldn't be careful. I dislike smog and appreciate trees as much as the next guy. We need to be conservative of our resources, but we're by no means close to exhausting the earth's resources.
Doesn't anybody else find it at least slightly funny that someone is proposing putting a Quantum Afterburner (TM) on a piston engine, the essential design of which is 125 years old? After all, there are other ways to recover waste heat in the exhaust that we could be using now, but aren't. Peltier junctions could be used to generate electricity to supplement or replace the function of the alternator once the engine was hot. Someone else here mentioned stirling engines. Maybe that'd be another way to increase the efficiency. Again, maybe you could drive the alternator with it. Of course, the alternator only uses maybe 1 or 2 horsepower anyway, so even eliminating that drag on the engine is only going to be a small improvement.
Than again... how many horsepower does a car use when cruising? Maybe eliminating 1 or 2 horsepower would make a difference. I would assume that this Quantum Afterburner (TM) would be able to recover a much greater amount of the waste heat, too, so maybe it would make quite a difference.
P.S. -- before anybody starts to rant on me for using horsepower, remember, there are metric horsepower too! According to my unit converter, one horsepower equals 1.01387 metric horsepower. Guess the French have different sized horses than the English! Cheers!
okay, you're right, but that's disgusting.
I agree with you on that. The text isn't attempting to be scientifically accurate. After all cubits and handsbreaths are hardly even fixed measures. Using such a text to discredit the Bible is a rather lame attempt. Sort of like in modern journalism they will often say things like "X is as long as three football fields". That's fine... the average person in their audience automatically has a good idea of just how long X is. They aren't trying to be exact, there's no point. I think it's just a matter of what is intended (an approximation) and, as you say, significant digits.
Thank you. I also read the Reuters article, and you're right... they are reporting the story, that's it. Some guy claims to have invented a machine that makes free energy. Seems to me like something a newspaper should report. Reuters isn't saying the guy is right or wrong, however, they do seem to cast doubt on it. I have my own serious doubts that this guy is right, but most /. posts thus far have been by people who have obviously not even read the article. Reuters isn't at fault here. They reported the news. Now, it's fully open for debate as to whether or not this Jasker guy is a crackpot. Of course, this is /., so I fully expect people to speak with their minds turned off.
Might explain that mysterious force that is accelerating everything outward around here. Maybe that accelerating force is the outer shell of the gravistar. _IF_ our observable universe is indeed inside one of these gravistars... imagine... there's an entire "something" outside that is completely and totally unobservable from inside. Not that that's necessarily any different than now, there are plenty of things that are unobservable, it's just that the traditional thought has been (at least for me) that the universe either dwindled away to nothingness at some point, or continued on with more stars, galaxies, and stuff forever. This idea implies that there's a solid outer wall to the universe. Or not. But it's fun to speculate...
If I had moderator points today, I'd moderate you insightful just for spite. :)
The springboard was a marvelous idea. The biggest selling point in my book being plug-and-play that actually worked. All software is on the card, and the Visor recognizes it instantly. Witness the Sony Clie's memory-stick camera. Note on their web site says that it only works after loading the software on seperately. That's a shame, because with the Springboard, it's 100% automatic. In the end, I think most people were like me and thought they were cool but couldn't fork over the money.
Couple of things...
First, you're right about the springboard slot, in a way. There are lots of modules available for it, then again they're a little pricey. On the other hand, Sony has a camera is supposedly will have a GPS module soon, for the memory stick slot.
Okay, so what really makes this thing tempting? 320x320 color screen. Compare that to 160x160 for the Visor Prism or the color Palms. Throw in Documents-to-Go, which is included with the Sony. It'll cost you $70 at PalmGear. Throw in an enhanced IR port, which I take it would compare to the Handspring OmniRemote module ($60 from Handspring). So right there is $130 in add-ons that are included with the Clie, already making it a better deal than the Prism.
Also, looks like the best price for a SpringBoard 16MB memory card is about $80. For that you can get a 64MB memory stick.
One last thing: Click on the product tour for the Clie. First pic is a side shot of the Clie. Yep, it's thin.
Now, I'm not necessarily sold on this Clie. I'm currently the proud owner of a Visor Deluxe, which I've had for a couple of years now. But it cost me $300 originally, so $400 for 4x the resolution, plus color, plus style, plus whatever else seems to me to be right on the money.
Now, I have a birthday coming up... I wonder if I can convince my wife how much I NEED a new PDA...
USB Cradle $50 bucks
AC Adapter $30 bucks
Stylus 3 Pack $15 bucks
Doesn't seem too bad...
Also, only compatible with Sony software? It runs the PalmOS, which means it's compatible with the largest selection of software available for any PDA.
Or maybe you were just trolling...
Well, at least they're told you they're going to build a road through your house and you didn't wake up this morning to a big yellow bulldozer outside your kitchen window. :)
But your post is right on. Storing nuclear waste in Yucca Mountain is the least-risky route. Launching the stuff to space would be cool, and would certainly rid us of the stuff, but one disaster...
Trucking it to Nevada and burying it under the desert is simply the best option. It would certainly be safe from "terrorists", as I imagine they'd never get past the security, and if they did, they'd die pretty quickly once they got underground with the stuff.
Maybe someday we'll have an abundant source of power that doesn't produce toxic waste, but for now, we're stuck with fossil fuels or nuclear fission. Myself, I like nuclear fission, because all the waste is contained. Nuclear fusion would be wonderful, but that's been 10 years away for the last 50 years. Beaming power down from satellites definitly has the geek factor, but seems to be way to obvious a target for sabotage.
I'm hopeful that this will finally go through.
First off, they don't say it can compress "random data", they say it can compress "practically random data", which I would take to be everyday sort of data like audio and video. And they don't say that data can be compressed infinitely. _If_ whatever they have does work, I suspect it'll be an enlightening moment for the rest of us if/when they release the details of their algorithm. Sort of like, if the only thing you're familiar with is the bubble sort, quick-sort is almost magical. Well, maybe the current schemes of run-length-encoding, and whatever other pattern matching we do, is akin to the bubble sort and these guys have put their heads together and created the quick-sort of data compression.
I'm not calling it either way, but all the "It can't be done! The world is flat!" comments are so typically... well... slashdot.
I think the difference isn't that you _can't_ do everything the new iMac can do with a PC, just that it's not standard in most PC's, and you definitely can't match the footprint. This new iMac is the sort of device you can give your grandma, along with a video camera with firewire output and she can start sending you DVD's of the local Bingo night. Nobody's doing anything in the computer business that's exclusively theirs, but Apple has been doing a very good job as of late in packaging things nicely. If I was in the market for a computer right now, I'd have to look at this new iMac. It'd definitely look nicer in the corner of my dining room (only place I've got for a computer right now) than my current beige box PC.
Don't you think it's kinda funny that MS tried this with NT? Granted, it was miles beyond 9x (and it originally came out before 9x, go figure) but, still, dropping out to a console and kill -9 is much more effective than trying to kill a process in NT (Ctrl-Alt-Del, open task manager, select end task, repeat until it works.) Of course, you mentioned restarting the gui without killing off the apps, which unix & linux can do, but obviously Windows cannot. Maybe Lindows will pull through. I would consider it one of the wonders of the world if anybody can make a system that can run windows EXE's and Linux ELF's side-by-side with no problems and no performance hit, which is what Lindows is claiming. More power to them!
The article clearly indicates that the maglev is going to provide an initial boost, not the full velocity required to reach orbit. Given that rockets use a large portion of their fuel before clearing the tower (a quarter/half of their fuel, something like that), it would be beneficial to use a maglev to get the craft moving before kicking in the rocket. I would envision they would go a step further and combine it with a scram jet. The scram jet won't work until it's super-sonic, so why not launch it super-sonic from the maglev, kick in the scram jet to the edge of the atmosphere, and then finally open up the liquid oxygen. Seems to me they'd save a tremendous amount of weight. You'd still save a lot of weight even if you leave out the scram jet.
yep. I made a big fool of myself and you had to post AC to prove it. :)
The point is that I have no need to figure--in my head--that if you run me through a blender (which I suspect you'd like to do right now) that I'd fit into a typical milk crate. Actually, I'd probably run out a bit...
:). If I do, the conversions are easy enough.
I know it's X miles from town A to town B. Fine, I have no need to know that in feet, furlongs, nautical miles or ki-LOM-eters
I know that, rounded to the nearest foot, I'm 6' tall. Closer than you'll get rounding to the nearest meter. Again, no need to convert to inches, hands or miles.
I know that my toilet uses (or is supposed to use) 1.2 gallons per flush. No need to convert to teaspoons, pints, quarts (though that's pretty obvious...) or liters (though that's also stated on the label).
I don't know right off the top of my head the mean distance from earth to the sun in miles or kilometers, but I do know that it is 1 AU, which seems to fit the English system of making the units fit the world rather than the other way around. Oh, I just did the conversion of 1AU to miles and km. 9.300e+7 miles or 1.496e+8 km. I have no need to know this in inches, furlongs, nautical miles, or light-years.
Made my point, right? English measurements are size appropriately to the things measured. There is normally no need to convert between said measures, and if needed, it is easily accomplished.
Happy flaming!
whoa there...
:)
;) (o-DOM-eter, not O-DO-meter) Actually, since ki-LOM-eters come from France, and many accents in French are on the second syllable, I guess is makes sense! Parle vous FranCAISE? (sorry for the missing accent marks, and stuff...)
you're probably right that it's what you're used to, but my point is that the arbitrary English units are plenty fine, thank you. The primary benefit of metric is that everything converts nicely. Granted. I don't have a need to go converting inches to furlongs everyday, and if I do, I'm sure I can find the conversion rate somewhere.
I guess it's just an American independence thing then... we don't want the French telling us what system of measurement to use.
As far as KILO-meter (or metre, for you French) vs ki-LOM-eter, I guess it just sounds better. Probably related to spe-DOM-eter rather than SPEED-O-meter.
Have a great day! And, hey, we're just having fun here, right?
People who age more slowly will have more children? What are you smoking? (Sorry to flame you, but I though you had already lit up...) The number of children one has nowadays is almost 100% related to personal choice. (well, it always has been, but now avoiding sex isn't the choice; birth control is.) If a woman wants to have 2 kids (or 1 or 4, whatever) and has her tubes tied after that, it doesn't matter how slowly she ages, or how long she would have been fertile (without having her tubes tied), she's not likely to have more kids. You're theory MIGHT work for, say, cattle, which are pretty much going to have a calf once a year from the time they are able until they aren't, as long as a bull is in the same pasture with them. People have more choice than that, and I think the evolutionary tact there isn't going to work.
I wish people would stop banging on the English units. Use metric if you want and leave the rest of us alone! I'm either 5'11" (say, roughly 6') tall or 180.34cm. Now, which of those gives you a better mental picture of how tall I am? For scientific things, yes, powers of 10 work out real nice and all, but for everyday things, who the heck cares if you have to remember there's 12 inches in a foot... not that hard! The English units make a LOT more sense in everyday sorts of things. And, by the way, bushels of cotton per ACRE makes a lot of sense if you're raising cotton. Does metric even have "dry volume" measurements? I guess we could go with HECTOLITERS OF COTTON PER HECTARE? If my math is right, 1 bushel per acre works out to 0.8705 hectoliters per hectare.
:)
I suppose the CORRECT figures for NASA should have been a goal of 2.58 EUROS per GRAM! (Assuming an exchange rate of 1 EURO = $0.85, which is close.)
Sorry for the rant.
not quite. You're right about flodding the network, but the algorithm doesn't care about the order of the packets, or even if it gets them all.
That's not it. Because of their algorithm, order doesn't matter, and neither do dropped packets. The receiver only needs any n packets, so the transmitter keeps sending until the receiver says it got enough. Then the results are magically XORed to get the original file. So, no, you don't need a sequential number, you don't need to check if all packets arrived, and you don't have to rearrange them.
It looks to me like they don't care if packets get dropped. The sender just keeps jamming stuff down the pipe until the receiver gets enough. Yeah, seems to me they need some kind of flow control, and I definitely think it'd be a bandwidth hog.
Judging from this:
The sending side transmits these symbols until the box on the receiving end confirms that it's collected enough symbols. The receiving box then performs an XOR operation on the symbols to derive the original data.
It appears to me that the transmitting side generates the symbols (parameters of the equations, I guess) and begins sending them to the receiving side as fast as it can. Apparently there are multiple solutions to the equations that will arrive at the same answer, so when the receiving end has received enough symbols to make it works it says, "stop sending already!" Apparently they're getting their speed because A) things don't have to go in any order (that's how the 'net is supposed to work, right?) and B) Alice and Bob don't have to keep up this conversation: Alice: Hey, Bob, can you send me X? Bob: Okay, are you ready? A: Yes, Go ahead? B: Okay, here it comes. A: I'm waiting. B: Here's the first packet." A: What? That packet didn't make it over. B: Okay, here it is again. A: Okay, I got that packet. B: Good. A: Okay, I'm ready for the second packet. B: Okay, here's the second packet.
Okay, I had too much fun with the Alice and Bob conversation there. Anyway, it looks like there scheme is compressing things in the form of their equations, and then just sending them in a burst until the receiver is happy.
Sounds like it might work, but it'll generate a ton of network traffic, I'd bet!