Even if you blow the asteroid into dust, you have to deal with an immense amount of kinetic energy that will be converted into thermal energy when the dust hits the atmosphere. The thermal energy could incinerate a large portion of the Earth's surface.
With bombs, damage doesn't linearly scale with size. That is one of the reasons that huge thermonuclear weapons fell out of favor. You can cause more damage with ten 1MT bombs than you can with one 10MT bomb.
One difference, if I owe $5,000 on my car, and it gets repossessed and auctioned off by the bank for $10,000, the bank keeps the $5,000 they are owed and I get the $5,000 that was in excess of the debt.
Weird Al pays large sums of moneys to aquires rights to parody songs
From what I've read, Weird Al asks the original artist for permission to parody the song. Not because he has a legal obligation to obtain permission, but because he is a nice guy. This was the problem with Coolio and Amish Paradise. There was a breakdown in communication between Weird Al and Coolio. The original artist gets royalties from the sales of the parody, not big bags of cash for giving permission to Weird Al.
Who needs an editor. Real computers have front panels with switches and blinking lights.
I used to do it for short programs, esp. hardware tests and diagnostics.
I've run into hardware engineers who wrote all their firmware in machine code. They believed the use of an assembler was reserved for pascal coding, quiche eating, wimps with poor memories.
doesn't -every- area deserve to be paid attention to?
No, not when it leads to people thinking that they are doing something worthwhile for the environment, when all they are doing is wasting everyone's time and energy with trivia.
None of the old sci-fi digests are in business any more, and that is supposed to be one of the reasons they went out.
Not true. The last time I was in the local book store, they had three or four different small-form-factor science fiction magazines on display. I have noticed that they aren't displayed in as many magazine racks as they used to be.
The 6502 and 68000 were in production at that time. The problem with the 68000 was that Motorola was slow in getting the peripheral chips, such as the MMU and DMA controller, into production. Intel had all the 8-bit peripheral chips from the 8080, in quantity and cheap. The 8086 had already been used in the IBM displaywriter. An 8086 system wasn't that much more expensive to build than an 8088 system.
If the endian-ness, size of data types and struct packing is the same, even cruddy programs should work after a recompile. Anyone who uses asm() in C code should be shot.
It's perfectly legal if you have an amateur radio license. I could legally setup a 500 watt ATV (amateur TV) transmitter on 2.4 GHz. If it wiped out your wireless LAN, that would be your tough luck.
Then explain to me the result of one of the investigations into alien sightings; They found out that a lot, if not most, of the alien sightings in the US (I guess it also goes for other countries) happen to people living close to electrical power cables.
This is the same demographic that lives in trailer parks and reads the National Enquirer. Did you ever consider that land near power lines is cheap, nobody is going to pay a premium to have a high voltage transmission tower in their backyard, and that power companies like to route their lines through areas where the land is cheap and the residents have little political power?
I think the article missed a few points on the value of microcode. Microcode allows a CPU to be implemented with a much smaller transistor count than a full random logic design. Microcode ROMs are trivial to layout and verify in comparison to random logic. Bugs in microcode are much easier to fix than bugs in random logic. It takes a great deal of time to design and verify a full random logic design.
Due to incredible amount of programs written for the x86 architecture, machines that execute x86 instructions will be around for some time yet.
I think x86 compatibility is given more importance than it deserves. Most software is written in high-level languages like C and Visual Basic. Most of these programs could be ported to a new architecture with little effort. DEC proved that x86 programs could be translated/interpreted at acceptable speeds on a radically different architecture (Alpha). The x86 architecture is not what is keeping Intel in business, it is their production capacity (fabs, fabs and more fabs) to deliver a huge volume of x86 MIPS to the public at a low cost.
If you want a reliable link, you have to do link margin calculations and take weather and wind into account. If the path has 20 dB fades, you need an ERP 20 dB higher than the best case.
One of the advantages of microwave frequencies, esp. the 10 GHz X-band used by the Gunnplexer, is the ability to build very small and very high gain antennas. You can easily get 20 - 30 dB of gain over an isotropic source with a small antenna.
Editing and Advice. Some writers don't need it but most do.
Book Design and Typography. A well designed book is more attractive and easier to read.
Reputation. I know that certain publishers consistently publish good books and I am more likely to take a chance on a book published by someone I trust.
Part of the reason that the USA was reluctant to enter World War II as a combatant was the public awareness of how the British and others had used lies and propoganda to generate political and military support in World War I. Many of the lies and fabrications were publically exposed in the 1920s, leading to mistrust of European politicians. To many Americans, Europeans killing other Europeans was a European problem.
Re:Not likely to happen anytime soon...Here's why
on
Advertising Via GPS
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· Score: 4
It will happen, and soon.
The FCC has mandated that starting in October 2001, wireless carriers must deploy subscriber location systems capable of locating the subscriber's radio transceiver to an accuracy of 125 meters or better, at least 67% of the time. This is to support the 911 system, so that emergency services can be dispatched to the location of the caller.
As a cheaper way of speeding up hard disks, why don't drives have multiple heads per platter?
The problem is keeping the head aligned with the track on the disk. This is difficult enough with a single active head. As soon as you introduce multiple active heads, you have the problem of keeping multiple heads independently aligned with their tracks. Putting two heads on a single positioner arm isn't going to work because of thermal expansion/contraction of the positioner arm and mechanical errors with alignment of the positioner arm and the disk platter. You need independent positioner arms, each with its own servo system and read/write electronics. This is very expensive. Multiple heads on a positioner arm and head per track disks used to be common in high-performance disk drives when track densities were much lower than today. I used to use a computer that had a 5 MB head per track disk drive, it used up a whole 19" rack.
The advantage of these things is that you can drop a RAM drive into a system and get immediate performance benefits, without having to modify the applications and operating system. The system's RAM may already be maxed out or it may have a limited address space. The last time this came up, someone mentioned that there were external RAM drives with battery backup and a hard disk that could mirror the contents of the RAM.
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The tracking of space debris is performed by the U.S. Space Command's Space Surveillance Network, not NASA.
With bombs, damage doesn't linearly scale with size. That is one of the reasons that huge thermonuclear weapons fell out of favor. You can cause more damage with ten 1MT bombs than you can with one 10MT bomb.
One difference, if I owe $5,000 on my car, and it gets repossessed and auctioned off by the bank for $10,000, the bank keeps the $5,000 they are owed and I get the $5,000 that was in excess of the debt.
From what I've read, Weird Al asks the original artist for permission to parody the song. Not because he has a legal obligation to obtain permission, but because he is a nice guy. This was the problem with Coolio and Amish Paradise. There was a breakdown in communication between Weird Al and Coolio. The original artist gets royalties from the sales of the parody, not big bags of cash for giving permission to Weird Al.
I used to do it for short programs, esp. hardware tests and diagnostics.
I've run into hardware engineers who wrote all their firmware in machine code. They believed the use of an assembler was reserved for pascal coding, quiche eating, wimps with poor memories.
Obviously written by someone who has never coded a program in machine language with a pen, paper and a programmer's reference card (optional).
No, not when it leads to people thinking that they are doing something worthwhile for the environment, when all they are doing is wasting everyone's time and energy with trivia.
Not true. The last time I was in the local book store, they had three or four different small-form-factor science fiction magazines on display. I have noticed that they aren't displayed in as many magazine racks as they used to be.
The 6502 and 68000 were in production at that time. The problem with the 68000 was that Motorola was slow in getting the peripheral chips, such as the MMU and DMA controller, into production. Intel had all the 8-bit peripheral chips from the 8080, in quantity and cheap. The 8086 had already been used in the IBM displaywriter. An 8086 system wasn't that much more expensive to build than an 8088 system.
If the endian-ness, size of data types and struct packing is the same, even cruddy programs should work after a recompile. Anyone who uses asm() in C code should be shot.
What about people with disabilities? Are you going to tell them to bugger off too?
It's perfectly legal if you have an amateur radio license. I could legally setup a 500 watt ATV (amateur TV) transmitter on 2.4 GHz. If it wiped out your wireless LAN, that would be your tough luck.
This is the same demographic that lives in trailer parks and reads the National Enquirer. Did you ever consider that land near power lines is cheap, nobody is going to pay a premium to have a high voltage transmission tower in their backyard, and that power companies like to route their lines through areas where the land is cheap and the residents have little political power?
I think the article missed a few points on the value of microcode. Microcode allows a CPU to be implemented with a much smaller transistor count than a full random logic design. Microcode ROMs are trivial to layout and verify in comparison to random logic. Bugs in microcode are much easier to fix than bugs in random logic. It takes a great deal of time to design and verify a full random logic design.
I think x86 compatibility is given more importance than it deserves. Most software is written in high-level languages like C and Visual Basic. Most of these programs could be ported to a new architecture with little effort. DEC proved that x86 programs could be translated/interpreted at acceptable speeds on a radically different architecture (Alpha). The x86 architecture is not what is keeping Intel in business, it is their production capacity (fabs, fabs and more fabs) to deliver a huge volume of x86 MIPS to the public at a low cost.
If you want a reliable link, you have to do link margin calculations and take weather and wind into account. If the path has 20 dB fades, you need an ERP 20 dB higher than the best case.
One of the advantages of microwave frequencies, esp. the 10 GHz X-band used by the Gunnplexer, is the ability to build very small and very high gain antennas. You can easily get 20 - 30 dB of gain over an isotropic source with a small antenna.
I think the 56K symbol/second limit only applies to the 70 cm band. See Part 97 of the FCC regulations.
Designing and building a satellite that will survive launch and the conditions of space is not trivial.
When you add everything up (taxes, medical insurance, misc. benefits), the annual cost per employee is probably closer to $100K.
Part of the reason that the USA was reluctant to enter World War II as a combatant was the public awareness of how the British and others had used lies and propoganda to generate political and military support in World War I. Many of the lies and fabrications were publically exposed in the 1920s, leading to mistrust of European politicians. To many Americans, Europeans killing other Europeans was a European problem.
The FCC has mandated that starting in October 2001, wireless carriers must deploy subscriber location systems capable of locating the subscriber's radio transceiver to an accuracy of 125 meters or better, at least 67% of the time. This is to support the 911 system, so that emergency services can be dispatched to the location of the caller.
The problem is keeping the head aligned with the track on the disk. This is difficult enough with a single active head. As soon as you introduce multiple active heads, you have the problem of keeping multiple heads independently aligned with their tracks. Putting two heads on a single positioner arm isn't going to work because of thermal expansion/contraction of the positioner arm and mechanical errors with alignment of the positioner arm and the disk platter. You need independent positioner arms, each with its own servo system and read/write electronics. This is very expensive. Multiple heads on a positioner arm and head per track disks used to be common in high-performance disk drives when track densities were much lower than today. I used to use a computer that had a 5 MB head per track disk drive, it used up a whole 19" rack.
The advantage of these things is that you can drop a RAM drive into a system and get immediate performance benefits, without having to modify the applications and operating system. The system's RAM may already be maxed out or it may have a limited address space. The last time this came up, someone mentioned that there were external RAM drives with battery backup and a hard disk that could mirror the contents of the RAM.