What's so hard about making it hash right? The software on the disk says "Oh please all powerful VM, tell me what you hash to." And the VM replies "Oh, I hash to the same thing the normal one does. Duh." "Well, perhaps you could prove it? What does block 34 of your code look like?" "Oh, it's the same as the legit player. Duh." "Oh, well then, everything's ok by me!"
It's a fundamental truth that a program running on a machine can't prove the machine isn't modified. Or that it isn't running in emulation. It can just be made harder or easier to trick it.
Actually, I agree with you. Naturalism as a basis for ethics is severely flawed. Ethics ought to take a logical approach, based on goals and principles. It does, however, have some basis when it comes to morals -- rules handed down from authority as opposed to derived from first principles. If your argument is "homosexuality is immoral because God said so" then the fact that animals engage in the behavior is relevant -- after all, God created them that way, they didn't have free will to choose it. The argument works within the "God as definer of morals" framework, even though I have plenty of problems with the framework as a whole.
Except for the conspiracy about NASA, it's all plausible. I've worked with them; it's way too easy too attribute the Hubble stuff to general ineptness. No conspiracy required.
Also note, your 10m mirror doesn't get you 1cm resolution just because you use a high res sensor -- the diffraction limited resolution is ~1.22*wavelength*distance/diameter, or 2.56cm at 700nm (red) (again, 300km). It's down toward 1cm in the blue, though. And one other nit -- two mirrors isn't enough; that only gives you good resolution in one dimension. You'd need at least 3 to get both dimensions, which you definitely want.
Yikes, there are so many problems with this arguments I don't know where to begin. But, whether you're trolling or not, it's a commonly stated one, so I'll answer it (at least in part).
Regardless of how you define "moral behavior," many cases of AIDS are spread through "moral behavior." People get it from their spouse, when neither of them knew the spouse had it. The spouse might have gotten it from a previous partner, or a blood transfusion problem (fortunately rather rare now). What about the child who contracts it from their mother?
Whether sex outside of marriage is moral or not is a matter of personal interpretation. Certainly much of society views it as normal. Many people have a single monogamous relationship at a time, but more than one through their lifetime. Is that so immoral that we should condemn them to die because of it?
There is no evidence of "recruitment" by homosexuals. Rather, there is a mounting body of evidence that people become homosexual, bisexual, or heterosexual as a result of factors beyond their control -- both genetic and environmental. This, combined with ample of evidence of homosexuality in the animal kingdom, would seem to imply that homosexuality is quite natural -- and that therefore the classification of it as immoral is a rather odd invention of mankind.
As to why AIDS gets so much funding -- it's a horrible disease, with a near-100% fatality rate. It infects a staggering number of people. It is currently busy depopulating much of sub-Saharan Africa (where, by the way, the primary mechanism of spreading is between married partners and from mother to child). Diseases that are epidemic in scale, have exceedingly high fatality rates, and which we don't know how to cure should scare anyone. Hopefully all this research will be helpful if another such disease appears.
Actually, yes it is. Advanced adaptive optics *might* correct for some or most of the atmospheric distortion, but they can't overcome the diffraction limit. A 3m lens at 300km altitude can only resolve down to about 9cm resolution. That's way way better than Google Maps, but you can't identify a face that only takes up 4 "pixels".
It might not be entirely pointless to try, but I'm reasonably convinced of two things: I don't care (and don't need to) about the exact numbers, and it's growing.
I don't care largely because the software meets *my* needs. That's the most important thing to me. An assurance that it will continue to do so is also nice, and there are clearly a lot of people developing for it. I'm not worried on that front. People who have a big investment in *other people* using Linux (especially when said other people aren't developers) confuse me. (Well, except when they're trying to sell Linux software / services.)
It's growing. I can't tell you how much, but I can offer the anecdotal evidence that the responses I get to "I run Linux" have changed over the past few years. It's not always "What's that?" anymore. It's not uncommon to get questions about it in response -- people want to know how well it works, whether it runs the same software as Windows, etc. I just answer their questions and am polite and friendly about it.
Aluminum has a coefficient of thermal expansion of 24e-6 / deg C. Other normal metals are less. Gasoline has a volumetric coefficient of expansion of around 950e-6 / deg C (at least according to a couple other posters...), which is far higher (even after you convert to a volumetric expansion for aluminum of 24*3=72e-6 / deg C). In general, metals expand less than most other things, excepting some glasses and ceramics.
He states that to get a Mercury Capsule sized vessel to 0.1c takes about the energy consumption of the planet for 5 days. OK, sounds about right. He then states that this makes it impossible (accounting for inefficiencies). I'm less willing to buy that.
First reason: rockets are power hungry, yet we've done them before. When the Saturn V launched, instantaneous energy consumption in the US went up 6%. Sure, it's many orders of magnitude smaller, but the idea is the same: you store up the energy over a long period (antimatter, say), and then take it out in a hurry.
Second reason: energy consumption of the world is climbing, and will continue to do so. It may get briefly more expensive as we have oil problems, but renewable and nuclear sources will counteract that (if they don't, space colonization is pretty much a moot point). Wait a hundred years, and the energy requirement will merely read like the largest project humanity has ever undertaken, not something entirely ridiculous.
The basic error he's making is that he's arguing we can't do it with today's technology. Yup, I agree, but that's not the interesting question. I'll leave the question of whether things like generation ships can work from a social standpoint to others more qualified, but I'm confident they can *eventually* work from a technical one.
Not at all true. In order to operate it without problems while it was immersed in water you would have to do all that. Once the water is gone, it doesn't matter any more. And the circuitry is simple enough it's unlikely to be damaged by operation while it's wet -- it just won't function properly.
I've washed my current keyboard three times now, twice in the dishwasher and once in an ultrasonic alcohol bath. The only ill effects are that the sticker on the back is fading and the plastic on one of the screw holes has partially stripped (thread-cutting screws in plastic aren't particularly reusable). All three times I've tried to use it before it was fully dry, and all that happened was a few of the keys misbehaved.
It's not actually the water dissociating, it's stuff dissolving in it. Did they remove all oils and greases from the computer first? Did they take steps to prevent any from contacting the water? Also, you should be using deionized water for that experiment, not ordinary distilled or even RO water -- those still have too many ions in them. In order to properly clean the computer, you'd have to rinse with DI water, immerse in an ultrasonic cleaner with DI water, and then rinse again. At a minimum. And then you'd have to take steps to make sure it didn't get dirty during reassembly. Not clean room level steps, but assembling it in your average living room probably isn't a good idea.
Maybe you don't mind throwing out $20 worth of hardware every year or more, but as for me, if all I have to do is toss it in the dishwasher, I'll save the money and spend it on something else.
I've done this before. You can air dry it for only 24 hours in most climates, and a lot less if you're willing to take it apart after. If you use it before it's fully dry the worst that seems to happen is keys behave weirdly -- if that happens, it's not done drying yet.
At my current job I have access to an ultrasonic alcohol bath cleaner; that was quick and simple, and dried out even faster.
Compressed air nozzles also work well, though that's more for dust and debris and doesn't do much about the grimy stuff.
All the same, every piece of evidence helps. These things are never proven by *any* one piece of evidence. The more different types of evidence, especially from distinct sources, the better.
What happened to the "dupe" tag? Why doesn't it show up any more? Obviously I'm not the only one to notice, as it seems to have been replaced by "duped." So what happened to it, and all the humorous tags -- haha, itsatrap, etc. What gives?
Aerogel is far better than conventional foams, including high performance CFC-filled foams. It is far worse than a good vacuum dewar, though.
The extra fun part about the LH2 plumbing is that the condensing liquid is oxygen-enriched, which makes it even more hazardous. As if the 4%-75% explosive range in air wasn't wide enough...
If you haven't tried it, you should check out the Aspen Aerogels stuff. It's *far* easier to work with than the blocks (though somewhat heavier), and surprisingly cheap. Even with the improved strength, and the fact that the Shuttle "only" sees about 500 knots indicated airspeed, I'd be reluctant to trust it on the outside. Let alone the environmental protection from humidity and such. Now, if we could just *stop* *using* *hydrogen*, this would all get so much simpler and cheaper...
If the turbines ingested much of anything at all, they would fail. And turbines don't fail gently. They fail by throwing bits of metal outward that were formerly rotating at 30-100,000 rpm. The Shuttle can survive an engine shutting down (and has), but likely not one exploding.
There are glide-back abort modes, but they're very risky, and it's not clear things would survive turbine failures long enough to enact them.
All that said, I don't think chunks of foam coming off inside the tank is normally considered a huge concern. (But I don't really know; I've never worked with hydrogen.) See my other comments for why it's not obvious where to put the insulation; there are many factors at work. That's what makes rocket science hard -- none of the individual bits is *that* hard, there's just thousands of non-trivial details to work out, and they have this habit of interacting with each other.
Not true on all counts. Aspen Aerogels makes a felted insulating blanket out of the stuff; I've worked with it for Lox insulation. It's not even all that pricey -- $4/sq ft, 1/4" thickness. It works *great* on the ouside of the tank, when it doesn't have to have any strength (I wouldn't want to expose it to any sort of aerodynamic loading, though). However, it's quite porous (aerogels are inherently open-cell structure) and soaks up liquids quite well. I've personally experimented with immersing it in LN2; it's obviously not the right choice on the inside of the tank.
Oh, and vacuum isn't a possibility -- the structure required to hold vacuum is *far* heavier than that required to hold pressure. Vacuum is the insulator in standard cryo shipment (dewars), but there weight isn't a concern.
See my other comment for why it's not an easy task to decide whether to put the foam inside or outside. It's been done inside on eg the Saturn upper stages, and there are sound reasons both ways.
The alloys in question (one of the Aluminum/Lithium alloys, I don't remember which off hand) are just fine at deep cryo temperatures. Mostly it's steels that have trouble with cryos, most aluminums are ok. Many of them actually get stronger as the temperature drops, and I believe the Shuttle tank counts on this effect.
The solution to all of this, of course, is the obvious one -- don't use hydrogen! By many performance metrics, other fuels actually perform better, thanks to higher density and therefore lighter tankage for the same fuel mass. Kerosene, propane, and methane all have their benefits. It's time to get rid of the hydrogen religion, and go to easier to handle, cheaper, and better performing (in most applications) fuels.
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What's so hard about making it hash right? The software on the disk says "Oh please all powerful VM, tell me what you hash to." And the VM replies "Oh, I hash to the same thing the normal one does. Duh." "Well, perhaps you could prove it? What does block 34 of your code look like?" "Oh, it's the same as the legit player. Duh." "Oh, well then, everything's ok by me!"
It's a fundamental truth that a program running on a machine can't prove the machine isn't modified. Or that it isn't running in emulation. It can just be made harder or easier to trick it.
Actually, I agree with you. Naturalism as a basis for ethics is severely flawed. Ethics ought to take a logical approach, based on goals and principles. It does, however, have some basis when it comes to morals -- rules handed down from authority as opposed to derived from first principles. If your argument is "homosexuality is immoral because God said so" then the fact that animals engage in the behavior is relevant -- after all, God created them that way, they didn't have free will to choose it. The argument works within the "God as definer of morals" framework, even though I have plenty of problems with the framework as a whole.
Except for the conspiracy about NASA, it's all plausible. I've worked with them; it's way too easy too attribute the Hubble stuff to general ineptness. No conspiracy required.
Also note, your 10m mirror doesn't get you 1cm resolution just because you use a high res sensor -- the diffraction limited resolution is ~1.22*wavelength*distance/diameter, or 2.56cm at 700nm (red) (again, 300km). It's down toward 1cm in the blue, though. And one other nit -- two mirrors isn't enough; that only gives you good resolution in one dimension. You'd need at least 3 to get both dimensions, which you definitely want.
Yikes, there are so many problems with this arguments I don't know where to begin. But, whether you're trolling or not, it's a commonly stated one, so I'll answer it (at least in part).
Regardless of how you define "moral behavior," many cases of AIDS are spread through "moral behavior." People get it from their spouse, when neither of them knew the spouse had it. The spouse might have gotten it from a previous partner, or a blood transfusion problem (fortunately rather rare now). What about the child who contracts it from their mother?
Whether sex outside of marriage is moral or not is a matter of personal interpretation. Certainly much of society views it as normal. Many people have a single monogamous relationship at a time, but more than one through their lifetime. Is that so immoral that we should condemn them to die because of it?
There is no evidence of "recruitment" by homosexuals. Rather, there is a mounting body of evidence that people become homosexual, bisexual, or heterosexual as a result of factors beyond their control -- both genetic and environmental. This, combined with ample of evidence of homosexuality in the animal kingdom, would seem to imply that homosexuality is quite natural -- and that therefore the classification of it as immoral is a rather odd invention of mankind.
As to why AIDS gets so much funding -- it's a horrible disease, with a near-100% fatality rate. It infects a staggering number of people. It is currently busy depopulating much of sub-Saharan Africa (where, by the way, the primary mechanism of spreading is between married partners and from mother to child). Diseases that are epidemic in scale, have exceedingly high fatality rates, and which we don't know how to cure should scare anyone. Hopefully all this research will be helpful if another such disease appears.
Well, "Other" and "Don't Know" clearly shouldn't be grouped together.
Actually, yes it is. Advanced adaptive optics *might* correct for some or most of the atmospheric distortion, but they can't overcome the diffraction limit. A 3m lens at 300km altitude can only resolve down to about 9cm resolution. That's way way better than Google Maps, but you can't identify a face that only takes up 4 "pixels".
It might not be entirely pointless to try, but I'm reasonably convinced of two things: I don't care (and don't need to) about the exact numbers, and it's growing.
I don't care largely because the software meets *my* needs. That's the most important thing to me. An assurance that it will continue to do so is also nice, and there are clearly a lot of people developing for it. I'm not worried on that front. People who have a big investment in *other people* using Linux (especially when said other people aren't developers) confuse me. (Well, except when they're trying to sell Linux software / services.)
It's growing. I can't tell you how much, but I can offer the anecdotal evidence that the responses I get to "I run Linux" have changed over the past few years. It's not always "What's that?" anymore. It's not uncommon to get questions about it in response -- people want to know how well it works, whether it runs the same software as Windows, etc. I just answer their questions and am polite and friendly about it.
Aluminum has a coefficient of thermal expansion of 24e-6 / deg C. Other normal metals are less. Gasoline has a volumetric coefficient of expansion of around 950e-6 / deg C (at least according to a couple other posters...), which is far higher (even after you convert to a volumetric expansion for aluminum of 24*3=72e-6 / deg C). In general, metals expand less than most other things, excepting some glasses and ceramics.
I mean, seriously, are has affected? What kind of editor lets that through? Sheesh...
He states that to get a Mercury Capsule sized vessel to 0.1c takes about the energy consumption of the planet for 5 days. OK, sounds about right. He then states that this makes it impossible (accounting for inefficiencies). I'm less willing to buy that.
First reason: rockets are power hungry, yet we've done them before. When the Saturn V launched, instantaneous energy consumption in the US went up 6%. Sure, it's many orders of magnitude smaller, but the idea is the same: you store up the energy over a long period (antimatter, say), and then take it out in a hurry.
Second reason: energy consumption of the world is climbing, and will continue to do so. It may get briefly more expensive as we have oil problems, but renewable and nuclear sources will counteract that (if they don't, space colonization is pretty much a moot point). Wait a hundred years, and the energy requirement will merely read like the largest project humanity has ever undertaken, not something entirely ridiculous.
The basic error he's making is that he's arguing we can't do it with today's technology. Yup, I agree, but that's not the interesting question. I'll leave the question of whether things like generation ships can work from a social standpoint to others more qualified, but I'm confident they can *eventually* work from a technical one.
Not at all true. In order to operate it without problems while it was immersed in water you would have to do all that. Once the water is gone, it doesn't matter any more. And the circuitry is simple enough it's unlikely to be damaged by operation while it's wet -- it just won't function properly.
I've washed my current keyboard three times now, twice in the dishwasher and once in an ultrasonic alcohol bath. The only ill effects are that the sticker on the back is fading and the plastic on one of the screw holes has partially stripped (thread-cutting screws in plastic aren't particularly reusable). All three times I've tried to use it before it was fully dry, and all that happened was a few of the keys misbehaved.
It's not actually the water dissociating, it's stuff dissolving in it. Did they remove all oils and greases from the computer first? Did they take steps to prevent any from contacting the water? Also, you should be using deionized water for that experiment, not ordinary distilled or even RO water -- those still have too many ions in them. In order to properly clean the computer, you'd have to rinse with DI water, immerse in an ultrasonic cleaner with DI water, and then rinse again. At a minimum. And then you'd have to take steps to make sure it didn't get dirty during reassembly. Not clean room level steps, but assembling it in your average living room probably isn't a good idea.
Maybe you don't mind throwing out $20 worth of hardware every year or more, but as for me, if all I have to do is toss it in the dishwasher, I'll save the money and spend it on something else.
I've done this before. You can air dry it for only 24 hours in most climates, and a lot less if you're willing to take it apart after. If you use it before it's fully dry the worst that seems to happen is keys behave weirdly -- if that happens, it's not done drying yet.
At my current job I have access to an ultrasonic alcohol bath cleaner; that was quick and simple, and dried out even faster.
Compressed air nozzles also work well, though that's more for dust and debris and doesn't do much about the grimy stuff.
If ever there was an article that wanted the "No" tag... Damnit Slashdot, give us the old style tags back!
Nope. I remember waking up in the predawn hours to watch the show while eating breakfast.
And would that be illegal? Perhaps not very sympathetic, but that shouldn't change his rights under the law.
All the same, every piece of evidence helps. These things are never proven by *any* one piece of evidence. The more different types of evidence, especially from distinct sources, the better.
That should be obvious. TWC sells VOIP phone service last I checked; of course they'll "shape" other VOIP traffic.
What happened to the "dupe" tag? Why doesn't it show up any more? Obviously I'm not the only one to notice, as it seems to have been replaced by "duped." So what happened to it, and all the humorous tags -- haha, itsatrap, etc. What gives?
Aerogel is far better than conventional foams, including high performance CFC-filled foams. It is far worse than a good vacuum dewar, though.
The extra fun part about the LH2 plumbing is that the condensing liquid is oxygen-enriched, which makes it even more hazardous. As if the 4%-75% explosive range in air wasn't wide enough...
And people wonder why working with LH2 is hard ;)
If you haven't tried it, you should check out the Aspen Aerogels stuff. It's *far* easier to work with than the blocks (though somewhat heavier), and surprisingly cheap. Even with the improved strength, and the fact that the Shuttle "only" sees about 500 knots indicated airspeed, I'd be reluctant to trust it on the outside. Let alone the environmental protection from humidity and such. Now, if we could just *stop* *using* *hydrogen*, this would all get so much simpler and cheaper...
If the turbines ingested much of anything at all, they would fail. And turbines don't fail gently. They fail by throwing bits of metal outward that were formerly rotating at 30-100,000 rpm. The Shuttle can survive an engine shutting down (and has), but likely not one exploding.
There are glide-back abort modes, but they're very risky, and it's not clear things would survive turbine failures long enough to enact them.
All that said, I don't think chunks of foam coming off inside the tank is normally considered a huge concern. (But I don't really know; I've never worked with hydrogen.) See my other comments for why it's not obvious where to put the insulation; there are many factors at work. That's what makes rocket science hard -- none of the individual bits is *that* hard, there's just thousands of non-trivial details to work out, and they have this habit of interacting with each other.
Not true on all counts. Aspen Aerogels makes a felted insulating blanket out of the stuff; I've worked with it for Lox insulation. It's not even all that pricey -- $4/sq ft, 1/4" thickness. It works *great* on the ouside of the tank, when it doesn't have to have any strength (I wouldn't want to expose it to any sort of aerodynamic loading, though). However, it's quite porous (aerogels are inherently open-cell structure) and soaks up liquids quite well. I've personally experimented with immersing it in LN2; it's obviously not the right choice on the inside of the tank.
Oh, and vacuum isn't a possibility -- the structure required to hold vacuum is *far* heavier than that required to hold pressure. Vacuum is the insulator in standard cryo shipment (dewars), but there weight isn't a concern.
See my other comment for why it's not an easy task to decide whether to put the foam inside or outside. It's been done inside on eg the Saturn upper stages, and there are sound reasons both ways.
The alloys in question (one of the Aluminum/Lithium alloys, I don't remember which off hand) are just fine at deep cryo temperatures. Mostly it's steels that have trouble with cryos, most aluminums are ok. Many of them actually get stronger as the temperature drops, and I believe the Shuttle tank counts on this effect.
The solution to all of this, of course, is the obvious one -- don't use hydrogen! By many performance metrics, other fuels actually perform better, thanks to higher density and therefore lighter tankage for the same fuel mass. Kerosene, propane, and methane all have their benefits. It's time to get rid of the hydrogen religion, and go to easier to handle, cheaper, and better performing (in most applications) fuels.