> In the future I suggest you skip the Mathematics and pay more attention to English. For someone purporting to be clever your use of the language is utterly abysmal.
Sorry, sir (or madam), but although his writing is very conversational, it's not abysmal at all. I suspect he writes like he speaks, but that's not wrong even in academic terms if the venue is informal, which this venue is. Maybe you should post less on Slashdot so you can concentrate on refining your manners.
> You don't think that it's possible to intentionally sabotage an aircraft or spaceship by messing with its instrumentation?
Your miss is in your reasoning for sabotage. Catmeat said Gorbachev wanted to prevent a big space battle station from getting in the way of his overtures to the West, but the article stated that the first SKIF didn't have any weapons, it had scientific instruments, which is what Sai Babu meant by "instrumented". His argument is that there was no politically beneficial reason to order a non-combat-capable SKIF destroyed, and therefore it was more likely an accidental error.
> The grandparent meant "prying more money out of our precious entitlement programs"...except unfortunately I see little evidence of that either.
Why is the concept of "budget deficit" so hard to wrap your hands around? Haven't you ever seen someone max out a credit card before? Lowering taxes and not de-funding programs, and then spending money you don't have, just means that someone has to pay it back in the future. That doesn't invalidate the original comment about drumming up an emotional response to get funding for a project, or his comments about prying out money.
Not this time. The treaty forbade launching armed craft, but although this thing was slated as a weapons platform, the first unit was sent up without armaments, and no others went up because the project was scrapped with the fall of the Soviet Union.
> I sell you a computer for 50 dollars. You write a program, and sell it for 100 dollars. Where does the 100 dollars come from? From someone else. At the end of the day, someone pays.
Sure, someone pays, but it their returns increase due to the purchase, they gain too. In our example, assume I sell the $100 package to an accountant, who can use the package to increase his efficiency. Now, he can service more clients than before, so he makes more money than he would without the program. If that "more" is more than he paid, we both win. You can say that means his clients pay, but that's not really accurate. See, without the program, there would still be a need for accounting services, but those people would go somewhere else, so they would not have been his clients. So, an increase in efficiency can (and virtually always does) offset the cost of getting the equipment/service.
> If I understand the principles of Economics, everyone who gets rich, does so at someone elses "expense". You can't get rich without acquiring someone elses money...
Then you don't understand the principles of economics. If what you give to someone allows them to profit, monetarily or otherwise, above what they spent, then you've both profited. If I sell you a computer that allows you to work more efficiently, such that you can earn what you spent on the machine and then some, we've both gotten rich, and not at anyone else's expense.
> Fines can work very well, if done right. If it's say 3-4 times what came in because of the the activity, it's more than a cost of business.
The problem is in calculating that cost, and in recovery. Firstly, the damage a spammer does to the email system includes stuff like people who spend their time maintaining spam filters and mail servers, but it's hard to pin that to one person, so calculating how much damage is done is more than just adding up receipts. Also, getting solid information on what "came in" becomes problematic, especially if he's taken steps to hide his tracks. Secondly, if the fine runs into tens of millions of dollars, the the spammer can reasonably declare bankruptcy, find a home somewhere that won't kick you out of your house for doing so (several states won't foreclose on a primary residence) and other items to minimize the fine. If he can hide the money, then he makes a bunch and only loses a part of it. Sending him to jail disallows this sort of profit sheltering. Sure, he may be able to hide the money, but he has to spend the next nine years in jail. That will go much farther toward reducing his profits.
> Until you KNOW someone who has been convicted of manslaughter and has become a ward of the state in a juvenile detention facility, you DO NOT KNOW how violent video games can affect a young person.
And oddly, even after seeing it, you don't either. Why do you think no scientist who cares a bit about reputation bases a study or theory on one case? It's because it's not a good sample. There could be a thousand other pieces of the puzzle that you don't know about your friend's brother, and in opposition to him I can present a dozen of my college friends who spent countless hours fragging and never a single one of them did anything violent either as kids or as adults.
> At one point in time I would have agreed with your theory, but after seeing my best friend's little brother be convicted, it kind of changes your view on these things.
Perhaps it changes your view, but that's because you're allowing personal bias to stand in your way. If violent video games had a strong causative effect on juvenile violence, and the number of kids playing violent games has gone up, then there'd be a rise in juvenile violence. But the FBI, the department charged with maintaining statistics on such things, has reported that the number of incidents of juvenile violence in the U.S. has fallen every year for the last thirty years, which more than covers the "violent video games" era. Your best friend's brother is an outlier, or something else contributed to his fall.
> Of course, this is/., so no actual expertise or experience is needed to wax philosophical...
> Does this imply more people voting for Bush/against Kerry won't have the same effect?
His statement is dead on, and works both sides of the aisle. The more people get out and vote, the less likely either side is to be able to game the results. Fraud is easy when half of your electorate stays home on election day. The bigger the numbers, the harder it is to fudge "just enough" to change the result in either direction.
So, the more people that get out and vote for any candidate, the less likely cheating can affect the election. So get off your butt (if you're an American voter) tomorrow.
> It's rather darn good evidence that oil doesn't come from dead dinosaurs...
Not at all. The oil they expect to find on Titan isn't crude oil, it's hypercooled low hydrocarbons like methane, which can easily form without biology involved. The stuff they pump out of Earth, on the other hand, comes from biological matter.
Based on your idea, you'd only need a working design for a space elevator and a solution to the Grand Unified Theory that allows for harnessed gravitics.
> With an energy model (e.g. you must climb to height X and introduce "potential energy" Y--escape velocity is derived from a kinetic/potential energy model anyway), it becomes unambiguous about how energy you've spent so gains you, and you can now integrate issues of energy lost to drag from doing anything other than flying straight up, and the validity of shooting straight up is clear.
In theory, you're correct, but there are other factors with the "space plane" design that change the balance. The first is that using a space plane means you only need to lift a portion of your craft out of the atmosphere, leaving the plane part behind, so you need less fuel on the "space" part of the plane. Second, the "plane" part of the space plane can incorporate an air-breathing engine, so you don't have to carry all of the oxidizer with you from the launch pad, like the shuttle does. This lowers the amount of total weight you need to lift, which (using proper mission design) could offset the extra energy you're using in a not-straight-up flight. Whether the savings from less oxidizer/less to-space weight can make up for the extra wasted energy remains to be seen, but I have high hopes that it can be.
That would still be libel. By labelling you a "killer" without qualifying it, it would be simple to convince a judge that they damaged your reputation by deception. They'd have to recant it, which would eliminate their credibility, and would have to recompense you for the damage they did to your reputation, the price of which is left to the imagination.
> if you were a hunter and one time you killed a deer... then the national media posted a picture of you and had an article about how you were a murderer and people should not converse with you (without mentioning at all what you murdered)... I think you might change your mind.
That situation doesn't fit his comment. There's no state in the U.S. where killing a deer is legally considered "murder", so by calling him a murderer for killing a deer, they're committing libel, which is legally actionable.
> The law will provide little cover for a student being critical of the faculty. Even if he is technicaly in the right in this case, he'll be hammered for the least little thing in the future.
If he wins the lawsuit and stuff like this begins happening to him, he'll have good grounds for charges of retaliation, and judges take a startlingly dim view of that sort of thing. One of my classmates had the same thing happen at college, and the head of the Residence Life office ended up going to jail for thirty days as a result.
As I said in my last post, I wasn't going to go forward with the discussion, and in all honesty I doubt I will. The problem with our "discussion" (in quotes for reasons below) is that our premises simply rest too far apart to come to anything remotely resembling agreement. I read the referenced article about dinosaur depictions in ancient cultures, and I found the as I worked my way through it I reached an enlightenment. That enlightenment is that both sides of this argument are too stubborn about it.
On my side, there are people who will say that dinosaurs and people can't have lived together, and so any evidence at all must be faked or incorrect.
On your side, there are people who say that dinosaurs and people have to have lived together, so any evidence is irrefutable.
Both sides can be wrong here.
On my side, there may very well have been dinosaurs (or creatures akin to them) that lived in human times, and therefore some of the evidence might be real. The thunderbird example is a good example of that possibility.
On your side, folks use the Piltdown Man as proof that people will lie and fake stuff to back up their side of the story, and yet can't seem to allow that some ancient Greek guy could dig up a fossil head and then make up a story that he killed the beast himself, just to further his own glory.
This is why I've tired of bickering about it. I've conceded several points but I won't concede them all, and your religion simply does not allow you to yield any part of the point, because a big part of your religion is the prohibition against compromise. Arguing with intractability is pointless, so we're done. We'll just have to disagree.
I thought you at least deserved an explanation as to why I put down the ball and left.
> If you downshifted, the car would have still redlined, but it wouldn't have been going 95 mph.
If he stepped on the clutch and the brake, the car will decelerate faster than any downshifting could cause. The only reason to use the transmission to brake is in low-traction conditions (or, of course, in the case of brake failure). If your car is throttled up out of control, the best answer to safely stop the car is to disengage the engine and use the brakes to bring it to a stop. At best, downshifting will slow you down less quickly than the brakes, and at worst, downshifting too far can cause the car to "overbrake" and skid, and antilock braking systems can't compensate for transmission braking.
Counting an elevator as "falling" because the building fell with the elevator inside is just being hurky-jerky about it. We're talking about elevator cars falling down the shaft. Try to be an adult in the discussion, eh?
> But we do put a lot of trust on cruise control. On really wet surfaces, the wheel will be spun really fast because it slips and the car is trying to speed itself up. Once it grips, the car goes flying.
Not correct. The speedometer is tied to the wheel, not the road. If the wheel spins up, the speedometer goes up too (next time you're stuck in snow or mud, step on the gas and note that the speedometer moves even when the car doesn't). In your suggested scenario, the tire spinning will cause the cruise control to slow down, not speed up, since it assumes the tire is sticking so it'll think you're going too fast.
> Elevators fall sometimes, but we love not walking, don't we?
I'd like to see a report of this outside of movies. I frankly couldn't find one anywhere, and what I know of the design of elevators leads me to believe it's possible there's never been a failure.
...if this car had a manual transmission, there'd be no problem. Step on the clutch (why would you downshift instead of just holding the clutch open?), let the rev limiter protect the engine, and step on the brake. Car stops.
Because of this I'm inclined to believe it's an automatic transmission. Shifting it from drive to neutral will disengage it, and again the rev limiter covers the engine while the brakes stop the car. I'd like to see documentation of any automatic transmission that will refuse to disengage at any given engine or car speed, because that auto company would be wiped off the face of the Earth by lawsuits. I doubt such a transmission exists.
All in all, I suspect that the same thing happened here that happens in a lot of cases. I suspect he panicked when he couldn't stop the car and since nobody directly told him to shift it out of gear, he didn't think of it. Also, he managed to stop the car using just the brakes (which is as it should be; the brakes should be strong enough to stop the car under full power, assuming they're in good repair), so I further suspect that if he'd been calmer he could have stood on the brake pedal sooner.
Slashdot Mirror
> In the future I suggest you skip the Mathematics and pay more attention to English. For someone purporting to be clever your use of the language is utterly abysmal.
Sorry, sir (or madam), but although his writing is very conversational, it's not abysmal at all. I suspect he writes like he speaks, but that's not wrong even in academic terms if the venue is informal, which this venue is. Maybe you should post less on Slashdot so you can concentrate on refining your manners.
Virg
> You don't think that it's possible to intentionally sabotage an aircraft or spaceship by messing with its instrumentation?
Your miss is in your reasoning for sabotage. Catmeat said Gorbachev wanted to prevent a big space battle station from getting in the way of his overtures to the West, but the article stated that the first SKIF didn't have any weapons, it had scientific instruments, which is what Sai Babu meant by "instrumented". His argument is that there was no politically beneficial reason to order a non-combat-capable SKIF destroyed, and therefore it was more likely an accidental error.
Virg
> The grandparent meant "prying more money out of our precious entitlement programs"...except unfortunately I see little evidence of that either.
Why is the concept of "budget deficit" so hard to wrap your hands around? Haven't you ever seen someone max out a credit card before? Lowering taxes and not de-funding programs, and then spending money you don't have, just means that someone has to pay it back in the future. That doesn't invalidate the original comment about drumming up an emotional response to get funding for a project, or his comments about prying out money.
Virg
Not this time. The treaty forbade launching armed craft, but although this thing was slated as a weapons platform, the first unit was sent up without armaments, and no others went up because the project was scrapped with the fall of the Soviet Union.
Virg
> I sell you a computer for 50 dollars. You write a program, and sell it for 100 dollars. Where does the 100 dollars come from? From someone else. At the end of the day, someone pays.
Sure, someone pays, but it their returns increase due to the purchase, they gain too. In our example, assume I sell the $100 package to an accountant, who can use the package to increase his efficiency. Now, he can service more clients than before, so he makes more money than he would without the program. If that "more" is more than he paid, we both win. You can say that means his clients pay, but that's not really accurate. See, without the program, there would still be a need for accounting services, but those people would go somewhere else, so they would not have been his clients. So, an increase in efficiency can (and virtually always does) offset the cost of getting the equipment/service.
Virg
> If I understand the principles of Economics, everyone who gets rich, does so at someone elses "expense". You can't get rich without acquiring someone elses money...
Then you don't understand the principles of economics. If what you give to someone allows them to profit, monetarily or otherwise, above what they spent, then you've both profited. If I sell you a computer that allows you to work more efficiently, such that you can earn what you spent on the machine and then some, we've both gotten rich, and not at anyone else's expense.
Virg
> Fines can work very well, if done right. If it's say 3-4 times what came in because of the the activity, it's more than a cost of business.
The problem is in calculating that cost, and in recovery. Firstly, the damage a spammer does to the email system includes stuff like people who spend their time maintaining spam filters and mail servers, but it's hard to pin that to one person, so calculating how much damage is done is more than just adding up receipts. Also, getting solid information on what "came in" becomes problematic, especially if he's taken steps to hide his tracks. Secondly, if the fine runs into tens of millions of dollars, the the spammer can reasonably declare bankruptcy, find a home somewhere that won't kick you out of your house for doing so (several states won't foreclose on a primary residence) and other items to minimize the fine. If he can hide the money, then he makes a bunch and only loses a part of it. Sending him to jail disallows this sort of profit sheltering. Sure, he may be able to hide the money, but he has to spend the next nine years in jail. That will go much farther toward reducing his profits.
Virg
> Until you KNOW someone who has been convicted of manslaughter and has become a ward of the state in a juvenile detention facility, you DO NOT KNOW how violent video games can affect a young person.
/., so no actual expertise or experience is needed to wax philosophical...
And oddly, even after seeing it, you don't either. Why do you think no scientist who cares a bit about reputation bases a study or theory on one case? It's because it's not a good sample. There could be a thousand other pieces of the puzzle that you don't know about your friend's brother, and in opposition to him I can present a dozen of my college friends who spent countless hours fragging and never a single one of them did anything violent either as kids or as adults.
> At one point in time I would have agreed with your theory, but after seeing my best friend's little brother be convicted, it kind of changes your view on these things.
Perhaps it changes your view, but that's because you're allowing personal bias to stand in your way. If violent video games had a strong causative effect on juvenile violence, and the number of kids playing violent games has gone up, then there'd be a rise in juvenile violence. But the FBI, the department charged with maintaining statistics on such things, has reported that the number of incidents of juvenile violence in the U.S. has fallen every year for the last thirty years, which more than covers the "violent video games" era. Your best friend's brother is an outlier, or something else contributed to his fall.
> Of course, this is
You took the words right out of my mouth.
Virg
> I mean really, the spelling and grammar nazis here need to just can it.
Um, you split an infinitive there, cowboy.
Carry on.
Virg
> Does this imply more people voting for Bush/against Kerry won't have the same effect?
His statement is dead on, and works both sides of the aisle. The more people get out and vote, the less likely either side is to be able to game the results. Fraud is easy when half of your electorate stays home on election day. The bigger the numbers, the harder it is to fudge "just enough" to change the result in either direction.
So, the more people that get out and vote for any candidate, the less likely cheating can affect the election. So get off your butt (if you're an American voter) tomorrow.
Virg
> It's rather darn good evidence that oil doesn't come from dead dinosaurs...
Not at all. The oil they expect to find on Titan isn't crude oil, it's hypercooled low hydrocarbons like methane, which can easily form without biology involved. The stuff they pump out of Earth, on the other hand, comes from biological matter.
Virg
Based on your idea, you'd only need a working design for a space elevator and a solution to the Grand Unified Theory that allows for harnessed gravitics.
Keep working on it.
Virg
> With an energy model (e.g. you must climb to height X and introduce "potential energy" Y--escape velocity is derived from a kinetic/potential energy model anyway), it becomes unambiguous about how energy you've spent so gains you, and you can now integrate issues of energy lost to drag from doing anything other than flying straight up, and the validity of shooting straight up is clear.
In theory, you're correct, but there are other factors with the "space plane" design that change the balance. The first is that using a space plane means you only need to lift a portion of your craft out of the atmosphere, leaving the plane part behind, so you need less fuel on the "space" part of the plane. Second, the "plane" part of the space plane can incorporate an air-breathing engine, so you don't have to carry all of the oxidizer with you from the launch pad, like the shuttle does. This lowers the amount of total weight you need to lift, which (using proper mission design) could offset the extra energy you're using in a not-straight-up flight. Whether the savings from less oxidizer/less to-space weight can make up for the extra wasted energy remains to be seen, but I have high hopes that it can be.
Virg
> s/murder/kill/g probably.
That would still be libel. By labelling you a "killer" without qualifying it, it would be simple to convince a judge that they damaged your reputation by deception. They'd have to recant it, which would eliminate their credibility, and would have to recompense you for the damage they did to your reputation, the price of which is left to the imagination.
Virg
> if you were a hunter and one time you killed a deer... then the national media posted a picture of you and had an article about how you were a murderer and people should not converse with you (without mentioning at all what you murdered)... I think you might change your mind.
That situation doesn't fit his comment. There's no state in the U.S. where killing a deer is legally considered "murder", so by calling him a murderer for killing a deer, they're committing libel, which is legally actionable.
Virg
> The law will provide little cover for a student being critical of the faculty. Even if he is technicaly in the right in this case, he'll be hammered for the least little thing in the future.
If he wins the lawsuit and stuff like this begins happening to him, he'll have good grounds for charges of retaliation, and judges take a startlingly dim view of that sort of thing. One of my classmates had the same thing happen at college, and the head of the Residence Life office ended up going to jail for thirty days as a result.
Virg
As I said in my last post, I wasn't going to go forward with the discussion, and in all honesty I doubt I will. The problem with our "discussion" (in quotes for reasons below) is that our premises simply rest too far apart to come to anything remotely resembling agreement. I read the referenced article about dinosaur depictions in ancient cultures, and I found the as I worked my way through it I reached an enlightenment. That enlightenment is that both sides of this argument are too stubborn about it.
On my side, there are people who will say that dinosaurs and people can't have lived together, and so any evidence at all must be faked or incorrect.
On your side, there are people who say that dinosaurs and people have to have lived together, so any evidence is irrefutable.
Both sides can be wrong here.
On my side, there may very well have been dinosaurs (or creatures akin to them) that lived in human times, and therefore some of the evidence might be real. The thunderbird example is a good example of that possibility.
On your side, folks use the Piltdown Man as proof that people will lie and fake stuff to back up their side of the story, and yet can't seem to allow that some ancient Greek guy could dig up a fossil head and then make up a story that he killed the beast himself, just to further his own glory.
This is why I've tired of bickering about it. I've conceded several points but I won't concede them all, and your religion simply does not allow you to yield any part of the point, because a big part of your religion is the prohibition against compromise. Arguing with intractability is pointless, so we're done. We'll just have to disagree.
I thought you at least deserved an explanation as to why I put down the ball and left.
Virg
> If you downshifted, the car would have still redlined, but it wouldn't have been going 95 mph.
If he stepped on the clutch and the brake, the car will decelerate faster than any downshifting could cause. The only reason to use the transmission to brake is in low-traction conditions (or, of course, in the case of brake failure). If your car is throttled up out of control, the best answer to safely stop the car is to disengage the engine and use the brakes to bring it to a stop. At best, downshifting will slow you down less quickly than the brakes, and at worst, downshifting too far can cause the car to "overbrake" and skid, and antilock braking systems can't compensate for transmission braking.
Virg
> The difference is the same as cycling and going 100mph. You can't go 100mph on a bike!
You can if you're coming from space...
1.) Fall from SpaceShipOne
2.) Hold on tightly to bike.
3.) Achieve 100+ MPH.
4.) ?
5.) Profit!
6.) Payback (spelled "impact").
Virg
Too busy to check the title as well. The book was called _Unsafe at Any Speed_.
Virg
> I bet if you put a hundred tons in one at once it would overweigh the counter and fall.. some. :)
Sorry, but no. Putting that much in it would cause the floor to fall out of the car.
Virg
Counting an elevator as "falling" because the building fell with the elevator inside is just being hurky-jerky about it. We're talking about elevator cars falling down the shaft. Try to be an adult in the discussion, eh?
Virg
Then you didn't read the article. The elevator in question was moving upward when it killed the good doctor, which is an odd definition of "falling".
Virg
> But we do put a lot of trust on cruise control. On really wet surfaces, the wheel will be spun really fast because it slips and the car is trying to speed itself up. Once it grips, the car goes flying.
Not correct. The speedometer is tied to the wheel, not the road. If the wheel spins up, the speedometer goes up too (next time you're stuck in snow or mud, step on the gas and note that the speedometer moves even when the car doesn't). In your suggested scenario, the tire spinning will cause the cruise control to slow down, not speed up, since it assumes the tire is sticking so it'll think you're going too fast.
> Elevators fall sometimes, but we love not walking, don't we?
I'd like to see a report of this outside of movies. I frankly couldn't find one anywhere, and what I know of the design of elevators leads me to believe it's possible there's never been a failure.
Virg
...if this car had a manual transmission, there'd be no problem. Step on the clutch (why would you downshift instead of just holding the clutch open?), let the rev limiter protect the engine, and step on the brake. Car stops.
Because of this I'm inclined to believe it's an automatic transmission. Shifting it from drive to neutral will disengage it, and again the rev limiter covers the engine while the brakes stop the car. I'd like to see documentation of any automatic transmission that will refuse to disengage at any given engine or car speed, because that auto company would be wiped off the face of the Earth by lawsuits. I doubt such a transmission exists.
All in all, I suspect that the same thing happened here that happens in a lot of cases. I suspect he panicked when he couldn't stop the car and since nobody directly told him to shift it out of gear, he didn't think of it. Also, he managed to stop the car using just the brakes (which is as it should be; the brakes should be strong enough to stop the car under full power, assuming they're in good repair), so I further suspect that if he'd been calmer he could have stood on the brake pedal sooner.
Virg