if sleeper ships become common, the earliest launched ships will arrive well after ships launched much later.
This meme keeps getting repeated. There were even a bunch of Star Trek episodes that mentioned stuff like this (lost sleeper ships, such as Khan's ship the Botany Bay).
Why wouldn't sleeper ships have radio beacons, and if later ships developed better propulsion tech, they could catch up to the older ones, update their engines or transfer their crew. Why would you simply leave the older ships out there, knowing they're eventually going to catch up with you at the destination?
In the end it will also not matter, because when these people reach the distant location, there will be no compatible civilization on earth left. If any at all.
Who cares? Why is this important? If it takes you 10000 years to get to some other planet, you're probably not worried about going back to Earth. The point is to start a new civilization elsewhere.
Third, all that requires energy, which has to be brought with you.
That's what nuclear power is for. Once a ship is at speed, the ship's systems won't need much power, and that can be provided by nuclear fuel which lasts for thousands of years easily.
Therefore, the suspended animation must last that long without chemical decay of cellular structure.
Various animals have been found well-preserved in ice for thousands of years. Properly done, it should be possible to preserve tissue indefinitely with cryogenics. The key of course is the "properly done" part, which we haven't quite figured out. That doesn't mean it's impossible.
The main problem is, as you state, keeping the ship's technology in working order for that long. That's an engineering problem, and definitely not an insurmountable one. Lots of sci-fi stories have even postulated such missions with automated ships which would revive some humans if they detected a problem, so the humans could repair it and go back to cryonic suspension.
> The USA Federal Government has stated that not having a Facebook account is one way to identify a terrorist. Bullshit.
Not bullshit. The OP is referring to a leaked DHS or FBI powerpoint presentation where they listed things that might be indicators that someone's a "terrorist", and not having a Facebook account was one of the bullet-points. Here's an article for you.
This isn't regulation, it's corruption. It's a common feature of crappy, third-world countries. Well-run countries don't have this problem so much. You wouldn't see this in liberal, high quality-of-life index countries like Switzerland.
Taxi companies won't allow self-driving vehicles in NYC. It doesn't matter who wants to implement it. To get a license in NYC to operate a taxi costs a fortune, and the taxi companies would not allow any competition from such a system. It's simply going to be illegal to implement a system like what you describe.
That's easy: the taxi companies don't want it. Sounds like you're proposing two classes of taxis; the regular ones we have now, and a cheaper version (perhaps painted green instead of yellow) where you have to share rides with other passengers, wait longer, etc. The short answer is: that can't be done. It's totally impossible. The existing taxi companies wouldn't want this, that's why.
They could basically send you a huge chunk of the whole library in something the volume of a dvd/blue ray case and rather than stream the content you could stream just the access flag to allow you to view any particular bit of content at any particular time.
How long do you think it'd be before someone figured out how to hack that?
Wrong. Manufacturers, distributors, wholesalers, and retailers are all customers. The distributor is the customer of the manufacturer, the wholesaler is their customer, the retailer is their customer, and the consumer is their customer. The manufacturer is the customer of whoever sells components, raw materials, etc. Everyone's a customer of someone. That's why the term "customer" isn't used, and "consumer" is. The consumer is the end-user, the last link of the chain. They don't have any customers. They simply consume, and don't produce or act as a middleman.
You can attach all the negative connotations to the term you like, but the fact is the term is perfectly apt when you're talking about economics, and the term "customer" is totally different and not interchangeable.
Yeah, on the face of it, this really doesn't seem to make much sense. Taxis are a luxury. The whole point of them is you can jump in one at a moment's notice, and it'll take you wherever you want to go, with no delay other than that imposed by traffic. They're not cheap. If you want cheap and slow, that's what the subway and buses are for, or you can just walk.
The sprawl is probably mainly a function of the price of vehicle fuel. If fuel had been more expensive when Phoenix was built the blocks would have been filled with higher density.
Of course, and it's certainly possible to go block-by-block and raze the buildings and build higher-density ones, while leaving the main roads intact. Razing most of west Phoenix and south Phoenix wouldn't be a bad idea.... (and east Mesa too).
It might be considered more elegant to use a for loop, but faster to merely paste the results of the loop directly into the program so it doesn't have to run the loop every time it runs. (Of course, this does increase the size of the program though, so there are always trade-offs.)
Most compilers these days will do this automatically.
I'm not an expert on any compiler code, but I thought that gcc was actually comparatively new, as it used to be called "egcs", and was different from what used to be "gcc", and was a newer project. At some point, the gcc team decided to simply adopt egcs as the new gcc and dump the original as it was too old and crufty.
If you want to see a better example, take a look at the Phoenix, Arizona metro area. All the main roads are laid out along a 1-mile grid. (There's one irregularity just south of Baseline Road, where the surveyors had to throw in an offset because of the curvature of the Earth.) So all the main roads, with few exceptions (and with big exceptions in Scottsdale), fall along this 1-mile grid. Generally, the corners of main roads are used for commercial space (strip malls usually), and the central parts of these 1-square-mile blocks are used for residential areas (where the streets are different from place to place). It's an extremely easy city to navigate; if you want to know generally where someone lives, you ask them what their "cross streets" are, which is their nearest main intersection. Since there's only so many main roads in the whole metro area, it's pretty easy to memorize most of them and know exactly the location someone's referring to when they say "Rural and Warner" or "7th Street and Camelback".
Of course, the downside to all this is that the city is the poster child for urban sprawl and you can't get anywhere without a car.
Did you just claim that New York is more elegant than London?
I've never been to London, but I'm somewhat familiar with NYC (I live about 15 miles away), and NYC's elegance as compared to London is plainly obvious just by looking at maps of the two. (Note: by NYC I really mean Manhattan.) The streets in Manhattan are mostly laid out according to a grid, and the only place where there's problems is at the very southern end of the island, which is probably also the very oldest. London, by contrast, seems to have very little order to its streets, which is probably because it was never developed according to a master plan the way Manhattan most was, it grew organically over many centuries.
This doesn't mean everything in NYC is elegant; the subways for instance are a bit of a mess because they were originally all separate companies 100 years ago, each company having its own line(s), and these were later taken over by MTA and merged into a single system, but the legacy remains. However, the streets are (except for the southern tip) mostly a perfect grid, which I would call elegant. (Of course, it'd be nice if they'd clean up the streets and sidewalks sometime and make it so it doesn't stink so much in many places, but that's another issue. It'd also be nice if they closed many of the streets to car traffic and made people use public transit more, and built some better/faster subway lines while they're at it.)
It's not just modern compilers, it's modern CPUs. Today's CPUs have many features like pipelining and branch prediction to handle loops better, and modern compilers are written to take advantage of the architecture of modern CPUs. So that clever code may have worked very well on an 80386 CPU with a circa-1990 compiler, but on a Core i7, it'll perform much worse than a truly elegant and simply-coded algorithm.
I'm not a programmer, but it seems to me that different programming strategies are required for different situations. In the case of someone writing a kernel or other low-level code, you may want to optimize the hell out of the code even if it makes things hard to read. The idea here is that whoever is working on the code should have a pretty good idea of what they're doing and could read the difficult code, but performance is among the top priorities.
Not necessarily. Go look at the Wikipedia page for Duff's Device (discussed in the comments above). Something that's more complex and looks like it'd improve performance may very well achieve worse performance because of the nature of modern CPUs. As stated on the Wiki page, Duff's Device worked well when it was invented because C compilers did a poor job optimizing, and CPUs were much simpler. Now, compilers are much better, and CPUs have pipelines and built-in features to handle looping better (which modern compilers are designed to take advantage of), so constructs like Duff's Device end up performing worse.
Network transparency isn't a problem anyway. X isn't network transparent anymore for the vast majority of applications (no one uses Motif any more), it's only network capable. And just take a look at Windows: it works just fine over a network, much better in fact than Linux, thanks to RDP. I hate to praise Windows over Linux, but for doing GUI work over a network, Windows wins hands-down. Even better, RDP is an open protocol (or at least it has an open-source implementation, which is why you can remote into a Windows system using "rdesktop" on Linux), so it wouldn't be hard to use RDP in Wayland for viewing single windows or the entire desktop remotely.
You're not getting it. They understand that completely, they just don't care. Why would they care about the "damage"? It'll take years for the damage to be done, and by then, the executives will be long gone with their golden parachutes. Why should they give a shit about what happens to their company in 10-15 years, or even the country?
If they keep using the same 3rd-party program after many years with no source access and no support or updates, they're idiots. Basically you're talking about them using some 3rd-party program from a company that goes under, and continuing to use such a thing with zero support, no source code, etc. It's idiotic (not saying they wouldn't do this; companies have been known to be idiotic), because in a high-security application like an ATM, the ATM maker should have access to all the source code running on the machine or else they simply cannot verify it's secure. Does that 3rd-party widget have a backdoor? It very well could. Again, I wouldn't put it past the likes of Diebold to do something this dumb, but that's not the way it should be done.
The 2.4->2.6 transition was many years ago, and nothing has been broken since then (3.0 is just a continuation of the 2.6 series). Even so, there's nothing stopping you from recompiling your 2.4 application for 2.6. Why would an ATM maker try to run the exact same 10-year-old binary on a brand-new OS/kernel? Obviously, in a system like that, you'd recompile against the latest libraries. The actual code changes would be minimal, if any (though would depend on what other libraries you're working with of course).
MS still supports most old software, and you can't do that without having security holes, or at least a much greater volume of code (to support all the workarounds and various old APIs), which necessarily means more bugs and more potential security holes.
As for law enforcement, it's well-known that MS OSes are wide-open to the NSA, and there's no way to disprove this since the code isn't open.
Managed-code OSes and Mach-style kernels are useless, since MS doesn't actually use those. Whoopee, they researched a bunch of cool stuff, but the stuff the sell is the same old same old. That's like all those concept cars that carmakers built and showed off, while they were selling ugly K-cars to the public.
All the banks just had to replace their ATMs with audio-capable ones because of the ADA, so now they get to replace them all over again because of XP being EOL. Why would the ATM vendors want to adopt Linux, when they can use MS EOL as a convenient excuse to get the banks to replace their ATMs yet again in the future?
Slashdot Mirror
if sleeper ships become common, the earliest launched ships will arrive well after ships launched much later.
This meme keeps getting repeated. There were even a bunch of Star Trek episodes that mentioned stuff like this (lost sleeper ships, such as Khan's ship the Botany Bay).
Why wouldn't sleeper ships have radio beacons, and if later ships developed better propulsion tech, they could catch up to the older ones, update their engines or transfer their crew. Why would you simply leave the older ships out there, knowing they're eventually going to catch up with you at the destination?
In the end it will also not matter, because when these people reach the distant location, there will be no compatible civilization on earth left. If any at all.
Who cares? Why is this important? If it takes you 10000 years to get to some other planet, you're probably not worried about going back to Earth. The point is to start a new civilization elsewhere.
Third, all that requires energy, which has to be brought with you.
That's what nuclear power is for. Once a ship is at speed, the ship's systems won't need much power, and that can be provided by nuclear fuel which lasts for thousands of years easily.
Therefore, the suspended animation must last that long without chemical decay of cellular structure.
Various animals have been found well-preserved in ice for thousands of years. Properly done, it should be possible to preserve tissue indefinitely with cryogenics. The key of course is the "properly done" part, which we haven't quite figured out. That doesn't mean it's impossible.
The main problem is, as you state, keeping the ship's technology in working order for that long. That's an engineering problem, and definitely not an insurmountable one. Lots of sci-fi stories have even postulated such missions with automated ships which would revive some humans if they detected a problem, so the humans could repair it and go back to cryonic suspension.
This thread is about cabs in NYC.
> The USA Federal Government has stated that not having a Facebook account is one way to identify a terrorist.
Bullshit.
Not bullshit. The OP is referring to a leaked DHS or FBI powerpoint presentation where they listed things that might be indicators that someone's a "terrorist", and not having a Facebook account was one of the bullet-points. Here's an article for you.
This isn't regulation, it's corruption. It's a common feature of crappy, third-world countries. Well-run countries don't have this problem so much. You wouldn't see this in liberal, high quality-of-life index countries like Switzerland.
Taxi companies won't allow self-driving vehicles in NYC. It doesn't matter who wants to implement it. To get a license in NYC to operate a taxi costs a fortune, and the taxi companies would not allow any competition from such a system. It's simply going to be illegal to implement a system like what you describe.
That's easy: the taxi companies don't want it. Sounds like you're proposing two classes of taxis; the regular ones we have now, and a cheaper version (perhaps painted green instead of yellow) where you have to share rides with other passengers, wait longer, etc. The short answer is: that can't be done. It's totally impossible. The existing taxi companies wouldn't want this, that's why.
They could basically send you a huge chunk of the whole library in something the volume of a dvd/blue ray case and rather than stream the content you could stream just the access flag to allow you to view any particular bit of content at any particular time.
How long do you think it'd be before someone figured out how to hack that?
Wrong. Manufacturers, distributors, wholesalers, and retailers are all customers. The distributor is the customer of the manufacturer, the wholesaler is their customer, the retailer is their customer, and the consumer is their customer. The manufacturer is the customer of whoever sells components, raw materials, etc. Everyone's a customer of someone. That's why the term "customer" isn't used, and "consumer" is. The consumer is the end-user, the last link of the chain. They don't have any customers. They simply consume, and don't produce or act as a middleman.
You can attach all the negative connotations to the term you like, but the fact is the term is perfectly apt when you're talking about economics, and the term "customer" is totally different and not interchangeable.
Yeah, on the face of it, this really doesn't seem to make much sense. Taxis are a luxury. The whole point of them is you can jump in one at a moment's notice, and it'll take you wherever you want to go, with no delay other than that imposed by traffic. They're not cheap. If you want cheap and slow, that's what the subway and buses are for, or you can just walk.
The sprawl is probably mainly a function of the price of vehicle fuel. If fuel had been more expensive when Phoenix was built the blocks would have been filled with higher density.
Of course, and it's certainly possible to go block-by-block and raze the buildings and build higher-density ones, while leaving the main roads intact. Razing most of west Phoenix and south Phoenix wouldn't be a bad idea.... (and east Mesa too).
It might be considered more elegant to use a for loop, but faster to merely paste the results of the loop directly into the program so it doesn't have to run the loop every time it runs. (Of course, this does increase the size of the program though, so there are always trade-offs.)
Most compilers these days will do this automatically.
I'm not an expert on any compiler code, but I thought that gcc was actually comparatively new, as it used to be called "egcs", and was different from what used to be "gcc", and was a newer project. At some point, the gcc team decided to simply adopt egcs as the new gcc and dump the original as it was too old and crufty.
If you want to see a better example, take a look at the Phoenix, Arizona metro area. All the main roads are laid out along a 1-mile grid. (There's one irregularity just south of Baseline Road, where the surveyors had to throw in an offset because of the curvature of the Earth.) So all the main roads, with few exceptions (and with big exceptions in Scottsdale), fall along this 1-mile grid. Generally, the corners of main roads are used for commercial space (strip malls usually), and the central parts of these 1-square-mile blocks are used for residential areas (where the streets are different from place to place). It's an extremely easy city to navigate; if you want to know generally where someone lives, you ask them what their "cross streets" are, which is their nearest main intersection. Since there's only so many main roads in the whole metro area, it's pretty easy to memorize most of them and know exactly the location someone's referring to when they say "Rural and Warner" or "7th Street and Camelback".
Of course, the downside to all this is that the city is the poster child for urban sprawl and you can't get anywhere without a car.
Did you just claim that New York is more elegant than London?
I've never been to London, but I'm somewhat familiar with NYC (I live about 15 miles away), and NYC's elegance as compared to London is plainly obvious just by looking at maps of the two. (Note: by NYC I really mean Manhattan.) The streets in Manhattan are mostly laid out according to a grid, and the only place where there's problems is at the very southern end of the island, which is probably also the very oldest. London, by contrast, seems to have very little order to its streets, which is probably because it was never developed according to a master plan the way Manhattan most was, it grew organically over many centuries.
This doesn't mean everything in NYC is elegant; the subways for instance are a bit of a mess because they were originally all separate companies 100 years ago, each company having its own line(s), and these were later taken over by MTA and merged into a single system, but the legacy remains. However, the streets are (except for the southern tip) mostly a perfect grid, which I would call elegant. (Of course, it'd be nice if they'd clean up the streets and sidewalks sometime and make it so it doesn't stink so much in many places, but that's another issue. It'd also be nice if they closed many of the streets to car traffic and made people use public transit more, and built some better/faster subway lines while they're at it.)
It's not just modern compilers, it's modern CPUs. Today's CPUs have many features like pipelining and branch prediction to handle loops better, and modern compilers are written to take advantage of the architecture of modern CPUs. So that clever code may have worked very well on an 80386 CPU with a circa-1990 compiler, but on a Core i7, it'll perform much worse than a truly elegant and simply-coded algorithm.
I'm not a programmer, but it seems to me that different programming strategies are required for different situations. In the case of someone writing a kernel or other low-level code, you may want to optimize the hell out of the code even if it makes things hard to read. The idea here is that whoever is working on the code should have a pretty good idea of what they're doing and could read the difficult code, but performance is among the top priorities.
Not necessarily. Go look at the Wikipedia page for Duff's Device (discussed in the comments above). Something that's more complex and looks like it'd improve performance may very well achieve worse performance because of the nature of modern CPUs. As stated on the Wiki page, Duff's Device worked well when it was invented because C compilers did a poor job optimizing, and CPUs were much simpler. Now, compilers are much better, and CPUs have pipelines and built-in features to handle looping better (which modern compilers are designed to take advantage of), so constructs like Duff's Device end up performing worse.
Network transparency isn't a problem anyway. X isn't network transparent anymore for the vast majority of applications (no one uses Motif any more), it's only network capable. And just take a look at Windows: it works just fine over a network, much better in fact than Linux, thanks to RDP. I hate to praise Windows over Linux, but for doing GUI work over a network, Windows wins hands-down. Even better, RDP is an open protocol (or at least it has an open-source implementation, which is why you can remote into a Windows system using "rdesktop" on Linux), so it wouldn't be hard to use RDP in Wayland for viewing single windows or the entire desktop remotely.
You're not getting it. They understand that completely, they just don't care. Why would they care about the "damage"? It'll take years for the damage to be done, and by then, the executives will be long gone with their golden parachutes. Why should they give a shit about what happens to their company in 10-15 years, or even the country?
If they keep using the same 3rd-party program after many years with no source access and no support or updates, they're idiots. Basically you're talking about them using some 3rd-party program from a company that goes under, and continuing to use such a thing with zero support, no source code, etc. It's idiotic (not saying they wouldn't do this; companies have been known to be idiotic), because in a high-security application like an ATM, the ATM maker should have access to all the source code running on the machine or else they simply cannot verify it's secure. Does that 3rd-party widget have a backdoor? It very well could. Again, I wouldn't put it past the likes of Diebold to do something this dumb, but that's not the way it should be done.
Why would a company not have access to its own source code? You think Diebold doesn't have access to the source code for their own ATMs?
The 2.4->2.6 transition was many years ago, and nothing has been broken since then (3.0 is just a continuation of the 2.6 series). Even so, there's nothing stopping you from recompiling your 2.4 application for 2.6. Why would an ATM maker try to run the exact same 10-year-old binary on a brand-new OS/kernel? Obviously, in a system like that, you'd recompile against the latest libraries. The actual code changes would be minimal, if any (though would depend on what other libraries you're working with of course).
MS still supports most old software, and you can't do that without having security holes, or at least a much greater volume of code (to support all the workarounds and various old APIs), which necessarily means more bugs and more potential security holes.
As for law enforcement, it's well-known that MS OSes are wide-open to the NSA, and there's no way to disprove this since the code isn't open.
Managed-code OSes and Mach-style kernels are useless, since MS doesn't actually use those. Whoopee, they researched a bunch of cool stuff, but the stuff the sell is the same old same old. That's like all those concept cars that carmakers built and showed off, while they were selling ugly K-cars to the public.
Well advocating pro-space-exploration positions isn't a right-wing move.
All the banks just had to replace their ATMs with audio-capable ones because of the ADA, so now they get to replace them all over again because of XP being EOL. Why would the ATM vendors want to adopt Linux, when they can use MS EOL as a convenient excuse to get the banks to replace their ATMs yet again in the future?