Extra weight on a spacecraft is more problematic the longer the weight sticks around during launch, because the faster the extra weight ends up going, the more energy (i.e. fuel) is needed to accelerate it -- and the more fuel is needed to accelerate that fuel, and so on.
The shuttle external tank is carried almost all the way to orbit. Every pound of weight saved on the tank is roughly equal to an extra pound of payload, so leaving it unpainted makes a lot of sense.
But the Falcon 9 rocket's fancy paint job is on its first stage. This drops off long before orbit is reached, so it doesn't impact the cargo capacity nearly as much.
No matter what "killed" you, if you end up burning in a giant fireball, it's pretty pointless as to exactly how you died before that.
The cause is the breakup of the shuttle. All other points cascade from that event.
OK, since everyone likes automobile analogies, here's one for ya:
Alice is driving her car while drunk. She rear-ends a gasoline truck at moderate speed. Her seat belt and airbag fail to deploy, causing her to die from a fatal head injury. A few seconds later she and her car are incinerated by the gasoline spilling from the truck.
You'd say, who cares about the seat belt? Who gives a damn about the airbag? It's "pretty pointless", since she'd have just burned to death anyway.
Or to take your other post in this thread, who cares about the seat belt? Who cares about the airbag? It's pointless to discuss them, since the root cause of the accident was that Alice was drunk.
I'll tell you who cares: Bob. Bob is driving a similar make and model of car. Bob's cold sober, but his brakes fail on a steep hill, and he rear-ends a milk truck at moderate speed...
In this case, "medically sensitive data" isn't just heart-rate data. It also probably includes extremely graphic and grisly photographs.
Even if you think the astronauts have waived their right to medical privacy, their families have definitely not done so, and they deserve discretion and respect.
The "sensitive medical data" in question have not been thrown away, nor have they been ignored: if you read the report you'll find that autopsy data are used (in a guarded way) to reconstruct the events. But beyond that reconstruction, details of the physical injuries suffered by the crew aren't relevant to the public's understanding of the event, and should not be made public in a report like this one.
It's the second one that probably did most of the crew in.
The report points out that the buffeting forces were probably just a few G's, and that if the crew had been conscious and able to brace themselves, the "buffeting" injuries would probably not have been lethal.
The fact that they *did* get tossed around enough to take fatal head trauma indicates that they weren't conscious at the time.
The claim that the initial "depressurization" would make the crew "incapacitated within seconds" relies on the common perception that exposure to the vacuum of space makes your face explode.
No, it's based on the observation that of the crew who were fully suited up, none of them had closed the visors on their helmets, a quick and obvious response to depressurization. This indicates they lost consciousness *very* quickly once the cabin was breached.
You're right that we should avoid sugar-coating the truth here, but still, the smart money's on "sudden unconsciousness due to hypoxia" rather than "bludgeoned to death while conscious".
First, a general premise: kids of this age deserve respect, but are not yet given all the privileges of society granted to adults, because they have not yet learned enough to use those privileges responsibly. This especially applies to privacy. If you disagree with me on that, you might as well stop reading now.
--
Anyway, my solution: let's just use the same principles we used for schoolchildren *before* everyone had computers. No more, no less.
Dial the clock back to 1985. Did we search every student's book bag for pornographic magazines as they entered the school? No, but if a teacher caught 'em with it, they'd be frogmarched to the principle's office. Besides, kids are really creative about hiding contraband, you're not going to stop them if they're determined to bring a Playboy to school. But if a teacher heard giggling in the boys' room, he'd investigate. In 1985, did we hand out pieces of paper on a strict quota system to prevent them from passing notess in class? No, but the teacher would stop note-passing when she spotted it.
In an Internet world, this translates into not locking the laptops down at all -- let them access any sites they wish -- but monitor their Internet usage at school aggressively and proactively. And tell them exactly what you're doing.
Teachers should have a packet sniffer app running on their own machines that shows the destination and type of Net traffic occurring in their classroom in realtime. Distracting activities like online games, IM chat, e-mail, etc. should be red-flagged for the teacher to deal with as she sees fit. On a broader level, the principal's computer should have a packet-sniffing app that permits her to monitor for issues of significant disciplinary concern -- not simply iChatting in class, but say, reading up on bomb and drugmaking information.
Of course, all this network monitoring only works on the school grounds, but that's the limit of the school's jurisdiction. What the kids do in their homes is up to their *parents* to monitor -- and hopefully, the school gives the parents a similar application to use at home.
The laptops could also have software to search for and report highly suspicious stored files which make their way onto the computers without passing through the school's network. It's easy to do with Spotlight. You'd have to verify the integrity of the searching application to make sure it hasn't been tampered with, of course. This is more draconian than network sniffing, though, so I'd call it optional.
The nice thing about a monitoring but not disabling policy is that it allows you to handle edge cases well. Twelve-year-old girl reading the Wikipedia page on preteen lesbianism (assuming there is one)? The school can choose to ignore it, or maybe give some guidance. Eighteen-year-old boy reading the same website? Possibly a different action.
With aggressive monitoring, just like in 1985, teachers can choose to take action on what they see or not... the important thing is to give them the tools to observe what's happening in their classrooms.
God, I love the GAO. No matter how idiotic the federal government gets, the Government Accountability Office is always there to point out the insanity with respectful but absolutely devastating bluntness. Somehow they seem to be immune to the groupthink and pigheadedness that fills the rest of Washington -- and as the government's official internal critics, that's a very good sign.
I think the existence of the GAO is the surest proof that the U.S. hasn't completely gone down the tubes yet. We won't set off on the road to "1984" until the federal government stops honestly criticizing itself.
1999: "We shot down a missile!" Critics: Fine, but real missiles have decoys. 2001: "We shot down a missile! We had to put a radio beacon on it so we could figure out where it was." Critics: Fine, but real missiles have decoys. And no radio beacons. 2002: "We shot down a missile with some decoys! Okay they were terrible decoys, but still." Critics: Fine, but get some better decoys. 2006: "We shot down a missile!" Critics: Fine, but real missiles have decoys. And I'm having deja vu. 2008: "We shot down a missile!" Critics: Did it have decoys? "Well, no, they failed to work..."
F = p^2 / (rho0 c) where p = rms pressure variations in the sound wave (.01-.05 Pa or so for human voice) rho0 = density of air (1.3 kg/m3 typ.) c = speed of sound in air (330 m/s)
I get 1 microwatt per square meter. So for a 20-cm2 cell phone, 2 nanowatts, ignoring the receiver-coupling issues mentioned by the parent post.
No way, Jose, and by at least three zeros after the "1".
Check out my other reply to this thread. My objection is not to the modification of germ cells themselves, but the act of turning those deliberately-modified cells into a living breathing sentient person.
You and your girlfriend are probably doing everything you possibly can to *avoid* creating a living breathing person, so I got no problems with you.
My wife is a molecular biologist, and I've taken enough classes in it to know *exactly* what I'm talking about. I'm pro-choice and pro-stem cell research, and my wife and I (well, mostly her) have gone through several rounds of in-vitro fertilization, so I'm not objecting to this on any sort of "embryos are sacred" grounds.
The details of the process are irrelevant: what matters is the outcome. I said "something that would have been born a human baby" rather than "embryo" deliberately. Whether you touch an existing human egg or not, you're following a procedure that would generate a human baby, and using it to create a child that is definitely *not*.
This child will be different enough to the rest of humanity that she could never live as a normal person. Her race was different enough from ours that our ancestors either deliberately slaughtered her entire race, or simply out-competed her race for food and resources. Either way, even in this more enlightened times, the child would be so deeply disadvantaged (in every sense of the word) that creating her deliberately would be an act of heartless cruelty.
Keep in mind, this neanderthal won't be delivered by a stork. Creating one requires starting with something that would have been born as a modern human baby and modifying it so that it is, quite definitely, not.
Genetically modifying a human germ line because "it would be neat" is totally unethical. There is no scientific question important enough to justify this sort of massive genetic mutation of a human embryo. Case closed.
This is not nuclear fusion. This is not nuclear fission. There is nothing nuclear going on at all. There is no energy "created". There is plenty of chemical energy *released*.
This is nothing more and nothing less than a very very hot garbage incinerator and electrical generator with the word "plasma" stuck in there to impress people.
It has the same problems as a garbage incinerator: certain atoms are going to be toxic no matter what molecules they're part of. Mercury, cadmium, lead, and arsenic are common in garbage, and like pretty much the entire bottom right of the Periodic Table, will kill people and ruin the environment if you let them go out a smokestack in any form whatsoever.
Wait, hunh? What market do IBM and Apple compete in, anyway?
Apple: Desktop PCs Desktop operating systems Media Players Phones Artsy Pretentious Attitude
IBM: Semiconductors Server hardware Point of Sale crap Overpriced IT services for senile old corporations Lawyer zerg rushes B-school Pretentious Attitude
The only possible overlap was in desktop PCs, and IBM sold that division to Lenovo.
Replyin' to my own comment, since it's drawing some attention...
A little background: I've been only dabbling in the free Unix game since I switched to Mac a few years back -- partly *because* of my frustrations with X11 -- so some of my impressions are out of date, There's no question the UI layers on top of X have improved by leaps and bounds since then. And I'm by no means an X developer.
Yes, I understand that X is intended to be a rendering engine, and that user interaction isn't its main job. Yet somehow, it seems to me that I *constantly* end up having to muck with userland X configuration scripts and reading cryptic X man pages in order to get my application running, if that application is anything more arcane than a web browser. If the goal is to make a black box labeled "No user serviceable parts inside", then it had better work without twiddling. And it doesn't.
Sounds like Xorg is making good progress, but I'm hoping for more. Borrow as much Xorg code as you can, but make the leap and blow a gigantic hole in backward compatibility, and focus on building a top-notch modern rendering system. Talk to the Gnome and KDE dudes to make sure you've got an API they're prepared to handle, and let xeyes and xclock and twm and fvwm slowly twist in the wind.
Every piece of software reaches a point where a ground-up re-engineering (which is not the same as a ground-up rewrite) is the best option, even if you lose backward compatibility. Apple, for instance, seems to do this about every 10 years. Not saying you should emulate them, but 20 years is just too damned long.
X has been a case study in How Not to Write Software for twenty years now. Once upon a time, it was a pretty cool experimental software project. But for twenty years now, there have been exactly two kinds of X development:
A) Throw a layer on top of it to make it useable for normal people
B) Throw another driver underneath it to make it just barely work on your particular hardware.
Project A is fine until someone has to get beyond your little layer, in which case it's.xinitrc hell. Project B is just treading water, postponing the day that we all realize this indispensable software tool is a gigantic house of cards headed for collapse.
Probably some XFree86 dudes are reading this. Let me just tell you I appreciate your diligence in the nightmare of a job you've set yourself to, but the time has come. Take off and nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
You're right about us Mac geeks, but it's got nothing to do with Macs, and everything to do with nerd macho. Linux folks will say "oh that's easy just do "perl -ne 's/\s/-/g; print;'", same for any operating system.
TFA is moronic. Why? Here's an analogy: you're a librarian at a big university library. You notice there's lots of gaps and empty space on the shelves, so you "condense" things by packing all the books up with no gaps. Hooray, now they all fit in two rooms and you've got a whole room full of empty shelves!
The next day in the mail, a new shipment of 200 new books arrives. You suddenly realize that you're going to either have to put all the new books together in the empty third room, breaking Library of Congress order and making them impossible to find, or reshelve every single book in the library.
There is nothing I hate more than having to use a trackpad as a click-button. You try to move the cursor and open up half a dozen links accidentally.
You misunderstand. This isn't the crappy "I barely brushed my finger over it and it thought I clicked" tap-to-click crap. The whole trackpad is a physical button, like the top of a mouse. You push it down firmly and it goes "click". You brush your finger over the top and it's a drag. If Apple has done their job properly, you won't accidentally click it any more than you accidentally click your desktop mouse while sliding it around on the table.
I haven't used one, but it has the potential to be beeautiful.
Well there went my hope that they'd finally offer us two-buttons.
Apple's current desktop mouse doesn't actually have two buttons, it has pressure-sensitive areas on the top and the whole top surface depresses. But it can tell which finger applied the pressure, and tell the difference between a left and a right click.
I'm only speculating here, but the same basic principle could be used with the new Macbook trackpads to give left and right clicks. Dunno if they actually did that.
While the primary goal for airplane designers is to try and minimize weight, a submarine must be extremely heavy in order to submerge underwater.
Bah! 19th-century thinking! Submarines fly like zeppelins: they try to match the density of the fluid around them. But as the Wright Brothers proved, you don't have to match the density of your medium to fly.
Picture something like an airplane, very much lighter than water, but with an inverted airfoil wing, which generates downward "lift" as it moves through the water. Just like an airplane, so long as it keeps moving forward, it can maintain level flight.
The power required to stay underwater using inverted wings is probably pretty high, but TFA says this vehicle's day job is as a military aircraft. If your power plant can manage Mach 2 in air, you can do just about anything underwater.
their desire to keep time-intensive activities to a minimum.
Interesting business model, Mythic. After the players blow through your content in the first four weeks, where do you expect your *second* month of subscriptions to come from?
That's the thing about WoW. Most of it is fun to play. The parts that aren't so fun are there to guarantee money hats for Blizzard's stockholders.
Slashdot Mirror
In addition to the factors already mentioned:
Extra weight on a spacecraft is more problematic the longer the weight sticks around during launch, because the faster the extra weight ends up going, the more energy (i.e. fuel) is needed to accelerate it -- and the more fuel is needed to accelerate that fuel, and so on.
The shuttle external tank is carried almost all the way to orbit. Every pound of weight saved on the tank is roughly equal to an extra pound of payload, so leaving it unpainted makes a lot of sense.
But the Falcon 9 rocket's fancy paint job is on its first stage. This drops off long before orbit is reached, so it doesn't impact the cargo capacity nearly as much.
No matter what "killed" you, if you end up burning in a giant fireball, it's pretty pointless as to exactly how you died before that.
The cause is the breakup of the shuttle.
All other points cascade from that event.
OK, since everyone likes automobile analogies, here's one for ya:
Alice is driving her car while drunk. She rear-ends a gasoline truck at moderate speed. Her seat belt and airbag fail to deploy, causing her to die from a fatal head injury. A few seconds later she and her car are incinerated by the gasoline spilling from the truck.
You'd say, who cares about the seat belt? Who gives a damn about the airbag? It's "pretty pointless", since she'd have just burned to death anyway.
Or to take your other post in this thread, who cares about the seat belt? Who cares about the airbag? It's pointless to discuss them, since the root cause of the accident was that Alice was drunk.
I'll tell you who cares: Bob. Bob is driving a similar make and model of car. Bob's cold sober, but his brakes fail on a steep hill, and he rear-ends a milk truck at moderate speed...
In this case, "medically sensitive data" isn't just heart-rate data. It also probably includes extremely graphic and grisly photographs.
Even if you think the astronauts have waived their right to medical privacy, their families have definitely not done so, and they deserve discretion and respect.
The "sensitive medical data" in question have not been thrown away, nor have they been ignored: if you read the report you'll find that autopsy data are used (in a guarded way) to reconstruct the events. But beyond that reconstruction, details of the physical injuries suffered by the crew aren't relevant to the public's understanding of the event, and should not be made public in a report like this one.
It's the second one that probably did most of the crew in.
The report points out that the buffeting forces were probably just a few G's, and that if the crew had been conscious and able to brace themselves, the "buffeting" injuries would probably not have been lethal.
The fact that they *did* get tossed around enough to take fatal head trauma indicates that they weren't conscious at the time.
The claim that the initial "depressurization" would make the crew "incapacitated within seconds" relies on the common perception that exposure to the vacuum of space makes your face explode.
No, it's based on the observation that of the crew who were fully suited up, none of them had closed the visors on their helmets, a quick and obvious response to depressurization. This indicates they lost consciousness *very* quickly once the cabin was breached.
You're right that we should avoid sugar-coating the truth here, but still, the smart money's on "sudden unconsciousness due to hypoxia" rather than "bludgeoned to death while conscious".
First, a general premise: kids of this age deserve respect, but are not yet given all the privileges of society granted to adults, because they have not yet learned enough to use those privileges responsibly. This especially applies to privacy. If you disagree with me on that, you might as well stop reading now.
--
Anyway, my solution: let's just use the same principles we used for schoolchildren *before* everyone had computers. No more, no less.
Dial the clock back to 1985. Did we search every student's book bag for pornographic magazines as they entered the school? No, but if a teacher caught 'em with it, they'd be frogmarched to the principle's office. Besides, kids are really creative about hiding contraband, you're not going to stop them if they're determined to bring a Playboy to school. But if a teacher heard giggling in the boys' room, he'd investigate. In 1985, did we hand out pieces of paper on a strict quota system to prevent them from passing notess in class? No, but the teacher would stop note-passing when she spotted it.
In an Internet world, this translates into not locking the laptops down at all -- let them access any sites they wish -- but monitor their Internet usage at school aggressively and proactively. And tell them exactly what you're doing.
Teachers should have a packet sniffer app running on their own machines that shows the destination and type of Net traffic occurring in their classroom in realtime. Distracting activities like online games, IM chat, e-mail, etc. should be red-flagged for the teacher to deal with as she sees fit. On a broader level, the principal's computer should have a packet-sniffing app that permits her to monitor for issues of significant disciplinary concern -- not simply iChatting in class, but say, reading up on bomb and drugmaking information.
Of course, all this network monitoring only works on the school grounds, but that's the limit of the school's jurisdiction. What the kids do in their homes is up to their *parents* to monitor -- and hopefully, the school gives the parents a similar application to use at home.
The laptops could also have software to search for and report highly suspicious stored files which make their way onto the computers without passing through the school's network. It's easy to do with Spotlight. You'd have to verify the integrity of the searching application to make sure it hasn't been tampered with, of course. This is more draconian than network sniffing, though, so I'd call it optional.
The nice thing about a monitoring but not disabling policy is that it allows you to handle edge cases well. Twelve-year-old girl reading the Wikipedia page on preteen lesbianism (assuming there is one)? The school can choose to ignore it, or maybe give some guidance. Eighteen-year-old boy reading the same website? Possibly a different action.
With aggressive monitoring, just like in 1985, teachers can choose to take action on what they see or not... the important thing is to give them the tools to observe what's happening in their classrooms.
God, I love the GAO. No matter how idiotic the federal government gets, the Government Accountability Office is always there to point out the insanity with respectful but absolutely devastating bluntness. Somehow they seem to be immune to the groupthink and pigheadedness that fills the rest of Washington -- and as the government's official internal critics, that's a very good sign.
I think the existence of the GAO is the surest proof that the U.S. hasn't completely gone down the tubes yet. We won't set off on the road to "1984" until the federal government stops honestly criticizing itself.
Best of all, *you* can use the tool he's using to look at world social stats yourself: gapminder.org
Good lord, how have we not yet had a Slashdot article on Gapminder? Submitting now.
"I don't know why you're assuming that the goal of the test was to show the system worked perfectly and could not be fooled."
Because we've seen articles like this before. A quick glance through http://www.globalsecurity.org/space/systems/nmd-test.htm mentions "successful" tests in 1999, 2001, 2002, 2005, and 2006.
1999: "We shot down a missile!"
Critics: Fine, but real missiles have decoys.
2001: "We shot down a missile! We had to put a radio beacon on it so we could figure out where it was."
Critics: Fine, but real missiles have decoys. And no radio beacons.
2002: "We shot down a missile with some decoys! Okay they were terrible decoys, but still."
Critics: Fine, but get some better decoys.
2006: "We shot down a missile!"
Critics: Fine, but real missiles have decoys. And I'm having deja vu.
2008: "We shot down a missile!"
Critics: Did it have decoys?
"Well, no, they failed to work..."
A little help for those too lazy to do the math:
Power per area transmitted by a sound wave:
F = p^2 / (rho0 c)
where
p = rms pressure variations in the sound wave (.01-.05 Pa or so for human voice)
rho0 = density of air (1.3 kg/m3 typ.)
c = speed of sound in air (330 m/s)
I get 1 microwatt per square meter. So for a 20-cm2 cell phone, 2 nanowatts, ignoring the receiver-coupling issues mentioned by the parent post.
No way, Jose, and by at least three zeros after the "1".
Let's make that nine.
Check out my other reply to this thread. My objection is not to the modification of germ cells themselves, but the act of turning those deliberately-modified cells into a living breathing sentient person.
You and your girlfriend are probably doing everything you possibly can to *avoid* creating a living breathing person, so I got no problems with you.
My wife is a molecular biologist, and I've taken enough classes in it to know *exactly* what I'm talking about. I'm pro-choice and pro-stem cell research, and my wife and I (well, mostly her) have gone through several rounds of in-vitro fertilization, so I'm not objecting to this on any sort of "embryos are sacred" grounds.
The details of the process are irrelevant: what matters is the outcome. I said "something that would have been born a human baby" rather than "embryo" deliberately. Whether you touch an existing human egg or not, you're following a procedure that would generate a human baby, and using it to create a child that is definitely *not*.
This child will be different enough to the rest of humanity that she could never live as a normal person. Her race was different enough from ours that our ancestors either deliberately slaughtered her entire race, or simply out-competed her race for food and resources. Either way, even in this more enlightened times, the child would be so deeply disadvantaged (in every sense of the word) that creating her deliberately would be an act of heartless cruelty.
Keep in mind, this neanderthal won't be delivered by a stork. Creating one requires starting with something that would have been born as a modern human baby and modifying it so that it is, quite definitely, not.
Genetically modifying a human germ line because "it would be neat" is totally unethical. There is no scientific question important enough to justify this sort of massive genetic mutation of a human embryo. Case closed.
Maybe the fact that nobody's ever *heard* of this obscure Google service is part of the reason it hasn't been successful.
You all fail at physics.
This is not nuclear fusion.
This is not nuclear fission.
There is nothing nuclear going on at all.
There is no energy "created".
There is plenty of chemical energy *released*.
This is nothing more and nothing less than a very very hot garbage incinerator and electrical generator with the word "plasma" stuck in there to impress people.
It has the same problems as a garbage incinerator: certain atoms are going to be toxic no matter what molecules they're part of. Mercury, cadmium, lead, and arsenic are common in garbage, and like pretty much the entire bottom right of the Periodic Table, will kill people and ruin the environment if you let them go out a smokestack in any form whatsoever.
Wait, hunh? What market do IBM and Apple compete in, anyway?
Apple:
Desktop PCs
Desktop operating systems
Media Players
Phones
Artsy Pretentious Attitude
IBM:
Semiconductors
Server hardware
Point of Sale crap
Overpriced IT services for senile old corporations
Lawyer zerg rushes
B-school Pretentious Attitude
The only possible overlap was in desktop PCs, and IBM sold that division to Lenovo.
Replyin' to my own comment, since it's drawing some attention...
A little background: I've been only dabbling in the free Unix game since I switched to Mac a few years back -- partly *because* of my frustrations with X11 -- so some of my impressions are out of date, There's no question the UI layers on top of X have improved by leaps and bounds since then. And I'm by no means an X developer.
Yes, I understand that X is intended to be a rendering engine, and that user interaction isn't its main job. Yet somehow, it seems to me that I *constantly* end up having to muck with userland X configuration scripts and reading cryptic X man pages in order to get my application running, if that application is anything more arcane than a web browser. If the goal is to make a black box labeled "No user serviceable parts inside", then it had better work without twiddling. And it doesn't.
Sounds like Xorg is making good progress, but I'm hoping for more. Borrow as much Xorg code as you can, but make the leap and blow a gigantic hole in backward compatibility, and focus on building a top-notch modern rendering system. Talk to the Gnome and KDE dudes to make sure you've got an API they're prepared to handle, and let xeyes and xclock and twm and fvwm slowly twist in the wind.
Every piece of software reaches a point where a ground-up re-engineering (which is not the same as a ground-up rewrite) is the best option, even if you lose backward compatibility. Apple, for instance, seems to do this about every 10 years. Not saying you should emulate them, but 20 years is just too damned long.
eliminate the cruft
ABOUT F'ING TIME.
X has been a case study in How Not to Write Software for twenty years now. Once upon a time, it was a pretty cool experimental software project. But for twenty years now, there have been exactly two kinds of X development:
A) Throw a layer on top of it to make it useable for normal people
B) Throw another driver underneath it to make it just barely work on your particular hardware.
Project A is fine until someone has to get beyond your little layer, in which case it's .xinitrc hell. Project B is just treading water, postponing the day that we all realize this indispensable software tool is a gigantic house of cards headed for collapse.
Probably some XFree86 dudes are reading this. Let me just tell you I appreciate your diligence in the nightmare of a job you've set yourself to, but the time has come. Take off and nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
A thread that's gotten 300 replies, and 8000 views? MY GOD! That makes this almost as big an issue as "Level to 70 Killing Only Boars"!
Expect the CNN helicopter to show up real soon now!
You're right about us Mac geeks, but it's got nothing to do with Macs, and everything to do with nerd macho. Linux folks will say "oh that's easy just do "perl -ne 's/\s/-/g; print;'", same for any operating system.
Let me guess, on weekends you bug the local country club because they won't let you play tournament golf with a yardstick instead of golf clubs?
TFA is moronic. Why? Here's an analogy: you're a librarian at a big university library. You notice there's lots of gaps and empty space on the shelves, so you "condense" things by packing all the books up with no gaps. Hooray, now they all fit in two rooms and you've got a whole room full of empty shelves!
The next day in the mail, a new shipment of 200 new books arrives. You suddenly realize that you're going to either have to put all the new books together in the empty third room, breaking Library of Congress order and making them impossible to find, or reshelve every single book in the library.
Oops.
And *that*, my friends, is why MIT needs a Class A internet address (18.*.*.*).
There is nothing I hate more than having to use a trackpad as a click-button. You try to move the cursor and open up half a dozen links accidentally.
You misunderstand. This isn't the crappy "I barely brushed my finger over it and it thought I clicked" tap-to-click crap. The whole trackpad is a physical button, like the top of a mouse. You push it down firmly and it goes "click". You brush your finger over the top and it's a drag. If Apple has done their job properly, you won't accidentally click it any more than you accidentally click your desktop mouse while sliding it around on the table.
I haven't used one, but it has the potential to be beeautiful.
Well there went my hope that they'd finally offer us two-buttons.
Apple's current desktop mouse doesn't actually have two buttons, it has pressure-sensitive areas on the top and the whole top surface depresses. But it can tell which finger applied the pressure, and tell the difference between a left and a right click.
I'm only speculating here, but the same basic principle could be used with the new Macbook trackpads to give left and right clicks. Dunno if they actually did that.
I see what you did there.
Grats on sarcastically reinventing the submarine. Now make it fly. (The point of TFA is to develop a vehicle that flies in *both* air and water.
While the primary goal for airplane designers is to try and minimize weight, a submarine must be extremely heavy in order to submerge underwater.
Bah! 19th-century thinking! Submarines fly like zeppelins: they try to match the density of the fluid around them. But as the Wright Brothers proved, you don't have to match the density of your medium to fly.
Picture something like an airplane, very much lighter than water, but with an inverted airfoil wing, which generates downward "lift" as it moves through the water. Just like an airplane, so long as it keeps moving forward, it can maintain level flight.
The power required to stay underwater using inverted wings is probably pretty high, but TFA says this vehicle's day job is as a military aircraft. If your power plant can manage Mach 2 in air, you can do just about anything underwater.
their desire to keep time-intensive activities to a minimum.
Interesting business model, Mythic. After the players blow through your content in the first four weeks, where do you expect your *second* month of subscriptions to come from?
That's the thing about WoW. Most of it is fun to play. The parts that aren't so fun are there to guarantee money hats for Blizzard's stockholders.