Any random person above the age of 16 can acquire a driver's license. There is no restriction, other than age.
Sure there are. You must be able to pass the written driver's test. That means you must be able to read. You must be able to see. You must be able to operate a car to the satisfaction of the examiner.
There's a difference between writing scifi and making technology that works. The former is imagination. The latter is innovation.
If you want an example of Google being innovative, though, look at their self-driving cars. A lot of people have tried to crack that problem. Google actually did it.
There will be a huge push now for electronic books under the guise of "convenience" but what it really comes down to is that they will want to "license" the book rather than sell it. At the same time, the electronic versions will simply continue to make the publishers less and less relevant especially for new titles.
While it's true that you only license the book when you get it electronically, for a large majority of cases, that's all the purchaser (or renter?) wants anyway.
You are a contractor. You either take the contract and teach their new hire how to work with and support your code to the best of your ability or you do not take the contract.
Actually transactions per second increases as well - the trick of course is that there's an adjustment period. If you take a bunch of people accustomed to being told exactly what to do it may take weeks before they adjust to actually paying attention and figuring things out for themselves on an ongoing basis.
Who said anything about cars going one at a time? - without any traffic signs you can pack that intersection just as full of cars as will fit - if for example someone is taking a left turn (wide for you non USers) all four incoming paths can also be making right turns simultaneously. And there's no reason the lane he's merging into can't be flowing as well. Even cross-traffic can keep flowing if there are suitable gaps to permit it. Chaotic? Yes, but also efficient so long as everyone is paying attention.
The problem with it, and the reason that we have traffic signals, is that the success of an unregulated intersection relies on nobody making any mistakes in a complex and confusing situation.
Sounds like just another way of preying on our fear of mortality to make a buck. What would your survivors rather have? A disk full of labeled and indexed photos or unlabeled photos and a stack of cash?
Isn't it better to pick a research plan you can assuredly finish in 2 years and then milk it for another 2 or the grant money runs out or you land a plum job, whichever comes first?
Not true, the fact of the matter is that card counting depends upon there being relatively large number of cards to function correctly. If you were trying to count against a single deck, you wouldn't see enough hands in order to have any meaningful impact on the cards.
That's ridiculous. The reason they use multi-deck shoes is to increase the difficulty of counting cards. If they were only dealing with 52, it would be relatively easy for a normal person to count cards according to a simple system and watch as the odds turned for or against them and increase or reduce their bets or change the level at which they stay. Also, if they use 12-deck shoes, it's impossible for a player to determine when the casino isn't playing with full decks.
My questions really didn't ask about Slashdot. Commenting and moderation on Slashdot are maybe not optimal, but they are a lot better than on many other sites, e.g. the newspaper site I mentioned. What I really want is for commenting fora that are a lot more broken than slashdot's to improve their systems so they become something more than rant havens for trolls so the comment streams actually begin to contribute something of value the articles that spawn them.
Just so, and influencing it in a positive way. Whereas a person who makes a trollish comment or mods a troll up is influencing society in a negative way, given the assumption that we would want people generally to be more influenced by consideration of facts than by their own preexisting opinions and biases. (This is not a universally held opinion. There are some who very much profit from having groups of followers locked into their existing views and avidly following mouthpieces of those views.)
So I have a question about what one should do about a forum that is dominated by trolls. For instance, my local newspaper's comments are dominated by right wing trolls and has about 25% of that number of left-wing trolls. There is a minority of respectful comments. All registered participants are allowed to upmod or downmod comments but there are no guidelines and people upmod or downmod based mostly on the degree to which they sympathize with the commenter's opinion.
In such a forum, is it better to:
avoid it like the plague
make maximally flameworthy comments in hopes that the forum will fix their commenting system
complain to management about abusive posts
complain to management about the commenting system
make reasoned and polite posts that might influence others by example?
To the villifier go the spoils. The first to call the opposition Nazis or some equally inflammatory term captures the hearts and minds of the readers. Only an idiot would think otherwise.
It's a stretch to call what they have in Europe, Australian, Canada, Japan or even China socialism. Those are capitalist economies with varying amounts of socialist elements. The same is true of the USA. North Korea is a whole different thing and the system they have there is very broken.
These days, tech companies send their employees to China with scrubbed laptops and burn phones for this reason. Then they scrub them again as soon as they get home.
The sad part is how long that took to become the norm.
I was recommending this long ago, and only in the last year or two has it become commonplace. Of course, I do the same thing when I travel to the US - except then I don't even bother copying my legally purchased mp3's as I know there is a good chance I'll get harassed about them.
That might be a good idea too, but unless the stories about China are wildly overblown, the extent of US spying on travelers is a great deal less than that of China.
The original sample was the cancer which killed Henrietta Lacks. Cancers generally have rampant chromosomal aberrations, though it is not entirely reasoned out if the aberrations are a cause or consequence of the unregulated growth which defines the cancer.
Let's call that YES and YES. Without genetic abnormality, there can be no cancer. Once the cancer exists, it evolves on its own, independent of the reproductive or even survival criteria of the parent organism. It evolves on its own, adapting itself to whatever conditions it exists in and growing as fast as possible.
It would be possible at least in principle for any individual animal or plant to spawn many new species of microbes that exist in the wild or possibly could invade other organisms. It's unlikely though. Our cells are the products of a billion generations of adaptation to functioning in a muliticellular organism. It's unlikely that they could exist on their own outside our bodies long enough to adapt -- except in the lab.
But that does not preclude many more planets further out. Planets orbiting close to their stars are are easy to detect with Kepler. It has a harder time finding stars that are at Earthlike distances because such planets are much less likely to transit while Kepler is watching.
Not unless you want the Chinese government to use it to track you wherever you go and aren't worried about them taking all of your private information and your passwords into corporate accounts and putting malware on it that will open a back door when you hook it back into your network when you get home.
These days, tech companies send their employees to China with scrubbed laptops and burn phones for this reason. Then they scrub them again as soon as they get home.
NASA lost satellites because of lead-free solder (despite them requesting leaded solder). The funny thing is, leaded solder completely prevents whisker formation.
Now, you may not care about whiskers if you just throw away your electronics every year or two, but if you want longevity, these things will kill you. So for lead-free solder preventing pollution? We are producing much more garbage now thanks to whisker-caused short circuit failures.
I agree with everything except the part where that has something to do with gold contamination in solder joints.
Yep. Gots to pay attention. Thick gold on the connector to connector contacts is best, but don't plate it onto the solderable end of the connector, or on the pads on in the through holes. Actually, a tiny amount is good because it prevents corrosion before you have the part soldered on, but it has to completely diffuse into the solder to avoid making a non-conductive boundary layer. If there's too much to diffuse, you're screwed. You'd think the engineers at Cray would know this.
I meant write GEO, not LEO. The reason is for exactly what you can't get in LEO: a more continuous link to Mars from your ground station. Yes, the earth station uplink antenna and the Earth-orbiting ground-link antenna don't really need to be very big, because the bandwidth is going to be limited by the interplanetary link speed anyway.
atmospheric attenuation is small (1dB ish) and everything is harder in LEO: power, maintenance, etc.
Yes, big dish orbiting Mars (doesn't have to be that big.. easier to make the dish(s) bigger on earth than fly it to Mars. 3-4 meters at mars. And a big dish at L2 in a halo orbit that can always see the Earth around the Moon's limb. Or, a bunch of lunar orbiters (with a fair amount of fuel.. it's hard to keep things in a stable orbit at the Moon because the Earth keeps pulling them off path)
The antenna at Mars pointed at Earth needs to be as big as you can practically make it because received power (therefore bitrate) at Earth is proportional to the product of the dish areas times the transmitter power.
How much storage should you have and where should it be?
How do you integrate navigation with this (spacecraft are navigated by precise measurements of the Doppler shift and round trip time delay of the radio signals carrying the data)? DO you have a separate system for nav and data. When you send data at 10 bps, frequency control and measurement to fractions of a Hz was free. But do you really want to control the frequency of your 32 GHz carrier with 1Gbps modulation to that level?
How do you transfer time from earth to a lander on the back side of the moon or mars?
Why would you put a 1Gbps link on 32 GHz? I can't think of a good reason to go that high. If you need precise Dopplers, put a slowly-modulated pilot carrier on the link. If you want to get precise time to and from the spacecraft, use two-way time transfer. If you need it on the ground on the back side of the moon, you're going to need orbiters to relay the signals around. On Mars, that's one option, or clocks with more than 12 hour holdover that re-synch when they come back to positions where Earth is visible.
Also, 1Gbps is pretty out there for interplanetary comms. You would need 100 meter dishes on both ends and a 100kW transmitter.
Try 100kbps. You can do that with a 10m dish, a 100m dish at Earth and 3kW of transmitter power. (Assuming a typical range of 200 million kilometers. You can turn up the speed when we're closer and would have to turn it down when we're farther away.) Of course, transmitter power from Earth may be not so much of a problem. All the better for the astronauts to get their MTV.
The one of the pair that I know better is an accomplished aerospace and materials engineer, holds more than a dozen patents on novel materials, has several published books and co-founded a company based on his inventions. I'm sure he won't leave a mark.
And he rides a Harley. For some reason, he thinks it's fun. I understand it doesn't take a lot of smarts to ride one. It just takes more than you've shown in judging people's intellect by a single aspect of how they choose to entertain themselves.
Please don't embarrass yourself any further by misusing any other phrases you don't understand. I don't think I can stand that much schadenfreude.
Reading that summary, it sounds like NASA thinks the distance to the moon and Mars is increasing enough to care about. Also that commercial development of Mars is something they should be concerned about in some nearby decade. Neither of those things is true.
Slashdot Mirror
Any random person above the age of 16 can acquire a driver's license. There is no restriction, other than age.
Sure there are. You must be able to pass the written driver's test. That means you must be able to read. You must be able to see. You must be able to operate a car to the satisfaction of the examiner.
There's a difference between writing scifi and making technology that works. The former is imagination. The latter is innovation.
If you want an example of Google being innovative, though, look at their self-driving cars. A lot of people have tried to crack that problem. Google actually did it.
There will be a huge push now for electronic books under the guise of "convenience" but what it really comes down to is that they will want to "license" the book rather than sell it. At the same time, the electronic versions will simply continue to make the publishers less and less relevant especially for new titles.
While it's true that you only license the book when you get it electronically, for a large majority of cases, that's all the purchaser (or renter?) wants anyway.
You are a contractor. You either take the contract and teach their new hire how to work with and support your code to the best of your ability or you do not take the contract.
Actually transactions per second increases as well - the trick of course is that there's an adjustment period. If you take a bunch of people accustomed to being told exactly what to do it may take weeks before they adjust to actually paying attention and figuring things out for themselves on an ongoing basis.
Who said anything about cars going one at a time? - without any traffic signs you can pack that intersection just as full of cars as will fit - if for example someone is taking a left turn (wide for you non USers) all four incoming paths can also be making right turns simultaneously. And there's no reason the lane he's merging into can't be flowing as well. Even cross-traffic can keep flowing if there are suitable gaps to permit it. Chaotic? Yes, but also efficient so long as everyone is paying attention.
The problem with it, and the reason that we have traffic signals, is that the success of an unregulated intersection relies on nobody making any mistakes in a complex and confusing situation.
That would also make it harder for the players to detect when the house has removed some cards from the deck.
Sounds like just another way of preying on our fear of mortality to make a buck. What would your survivors rather have? A disk full of labeled and indexed photos or unlabeled photos and a stack of cash?
Isn't it better to pick a research plan you can assuredly finish in 2 years and then milk it for another 2 or the grant money runs out or you land a plum job, whichever comes first?
Not true, the fact of the matter is that card counting depends upon there being relatively large number of cards to function correctly. If you were trying to count against a single deck, you wouldn't see enough hands in order to have any meaningful impact on the cards.
That's ridiculous. The reason they use multi-deck shoes is to increase the difficulty of counting cards. If they were only dealing with 52, it would be relatively easy for a normal person to count cards according to a simple system and watch as the odds turned for or against them and increase or reduce their bets or change the level at which they stay. Also, if they use 12-deck shoes, it's impossible for a player to determine when the casino isn't playing with full decks.
My questions really didn't ask about Slashdot. Commenting and moderation on Slashdot are maybe not optimal, but they are a lot better than on many other sites, e.g. the newspaper site I mentioned. What I really want is for commenting fora that are a lot more broken than slashdot's to improve their systems so they become something more than rant havens for trolls so the comment streams actually begin to contribute something of value the articles that spawn them.
Just so, and influencing it in a positive way. Whereas a person who makes a trollish comment or mods a troll up is influencing society in a negative way, given the assumption that we would want people generally to be more influenced by consideration of facts than by their own preexisting opinions and biases. (This is not a universally held opinion. There are some who very much profit from having groups of followers locked into their existing views and avidly following mouthpieces of those views.)
So I have a question about what one should do about a forum that is dominated by trolls. For instance, my local newspaper's comments are dominated by right wing trolls and has about 25% of that number of left-wing trolls. There is a minority of respectful comments. All registered participants are allowed to upmod or downmod comments but there are no guidelines and people upmod or downmod based mostly on the degree to which they sympathize with the commenter's opinion.
In such a forum, is it better to:
To the villifier go the spoils. The first to call the opposition Nazis or some equally inflammatory term captures the hearts and minds of the readers. Only an idiot would think otherwise.
Yes. Read about the historical roots of Asian fear of drugs here: Opium War
It's a stretch to call what they have in Europe, Australian, Canada, Japan or even China socialism. Those are capitalist economies with varying amounts of socialist elements. The same is true of the USA. North Korea is a whole different thing and the system they have there is very broken.
These days, tech companies send their employees to China with scrubbed laptops and burn phones for this reason. Then they scrub them again as soon as they get home.
The sad part is how long that took to become the norm.
I was recommending this long ago, and only in the last year or two has it become commonplace. Of course, I do the same thing when I travel to the US - except then I don't even bother copying my legally purchased mp3's as I know there is a good chance I'll get harassed about them.
That might be a good idea too, but unless the stories about China are wildly overblown, the extent of US spying on travelers is a great deal less than that of China.
I'd guess that Cray is buying connectors from a well-established manufacturer, not fabricating their own.
The product designer decides what connectors to buy.
The original sample was the cancer which killed Henrietta Lacks. Cancers generally have rampant chromosomal aberrations, though it is not entirely reasoned out if the aberrations are a cause or consequence of the unregulated growth which defines the cancer.
Let's call that YES and YES. Without genetic abnormality, there can be no cancer. Once the cancer exists, it evolves on its own, independent of the reproductive or even survival criteria of the parent organism. It evolves on its own, adapting itself to whatever conditions it exists in and growing as fast as possible.
It would be possible at least in principle for any individual animal or plant to spawn many new species of microbes that exist in the wild or possibly could invade other organisms. It's unlikely though. Our cells are the products of a billion generations of adaptation to functioning in a muliticellular organism. It's unlikely that they could exist on their own outside our bodies long enough to adapt -- except in the lab.
But that does not preclude many more planets further out. Planets orbiting close to their stars are are easy to detect with Kepler. It has a harder time finding stars that are at Earthlike distances because such planets are much less likely to transit while Kepler is watching.
Not unless you want the Chinese government to use it to track you wherever you go and aren't worried about them taking all of your private information and your passwords into corporate accounts and putting malware on it that will open a back door when you hook it back into your network when you get home.
These days, tech companies send their employees to China with scrubbed laptops and burn phones for this reason. Then they scrub them again as soon as they get home.
The lead-free solder has cost billions in failures.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whisker_(metallurgy) http://nepp.nasa.gov/WHISKER/
NASA lost satellites because of lead-free solder (despite them requesting leaded solder). The funny thing is, leaded solder completely prevents whisker formation.
Now, you may not care about whiskers if you just throw away your electronics every year or two, but if you want longevity, these things will kill you. So for lead-free solder preventing pollution? We are producing much more garbage now thanks to whisker-caused short circuit failures.
I agree with everything except the part where that has something to do with gold contamination in solder joints.
Yep. Gots to pay attention. Thick gold on the connector to connector contacts is best, but don't plate it onto the solderable end of the connector, or on the pads on in the through holes. Actually, a tiny amount is good because it prevents corrosion before you have the part soldered on, but it has to completely diffuse into the solder to avoid making a non-conductive boundary layer. If there's too much to diffuse, you're screwed. You'd think the engineers at Cray would know this.
why have a big dish in LEO..
I meant write GEO, not LEO. The reason is for exactly what you can't get in LEO: a more continuous link to Mars from your ground station. Yes, the earth station uplink antenna and the Earth-orbiting ground-link antenna don't really need to be very big, because the bandwidth is going to be limited by the interplanetary link speed anyway.
atmospheric attenuation is small (1dB ish) and everything is harder in LEO: power, maintenance, etc.
Yes, big dish orbiting Mars (doesn't have to be that big.. easier to make the dish(s) bigger on earth than fly it to Mars. 3-4 meters at mars. And a big dish at L2 in a halo orbit that can always see the Earth around the Moon's limb. Or, a bunch of lunar orbiters (with a fair amount of fuel.. it's hard to keep things in a stable orbit at the Moon because the Earth keeps pulling them off path)
The antenna at Mars pointed at Earth needs to be as big as you can practically make it because received power (therefore bitrate) at Earth is proportional to the product of the dish areas times the transmitter power.
How much storage should you have and where should it be?
How do you integrate navigation with this (spacecraft are navigated by precise measurements of the Doppler shift and round trip time delay of the radio signals carrying the data)? DO you have a separate system for nav and data. When you send data at 10 bps, frequency control and measurement to fractions of a Hz was free. But do you really want to control the frequency of your 32 GHz carrier with 1Gbps modulation to that level?
How do you transfer time from earth to a lander on the back side of the moon or mars?
Why would you put a 1Gbps link on 32 GHz? I can't think of a good reason to go that high. If you need precise Dopplers, put a slowly-modulated pilot carrier on the link. If you want to get precise time to and from the spacecraft, use two-way time transfer. If you need it on the ground on the back side of the moon, you're going to need orbiters to relay the signals around. On Mars, that's one option, or clocks with more than 12 hour holdover that re-synch when they come back to positions where Earth is visible.
Also, 1Gbps is pretty out there for interplanetary comms. You would need 100 meter dishes on both ends and a 100kW transmitter.
Try 100kbps. You can do that with a 10m dish, a 100m dish at Earth and 3kW of transmitter power. (Assuming a typical range of 200 million kilometers. You can turn up the speed when we're closer and would have to turn it down when we're farther away.) Of course, transmitter power from Earth may be not so much of a problem. All the better for the astronauts to get their MTV.
The one of the pair that I know better is an accomplished aerospace and materials engineer, holds more than a dozen patents on novel materials, has several published books and co-founded a company based on his inventions. I'm sure he won't leave a mark.
And he rides a Harley. For some reason, he thinks it's fun. I understand it doesn't take a lot of smarts to ride one. It just takes more than you've shown in judging people's intellect by a single aspect of how they choose to entertain themselves.
Please don't embarrass yourself any further by misusing any other phrases you don't understand. I don't think I can stand that much schadenfreude.
Reading that summary, it sounds like NASA thinks the distance to the moon and Mars is increasing enough to care about. Also that commercial development of Mars is something they should be concerned about in some nearby decade. Neither of those things is true.
But here's the architecture:
BIG fucking dish on Earth
pointed at BIG fucking dish at LEO
connected to BIG fucking dish pointed at Mars
BIG fucking dish orbiting Mars.
What about the hetero dads who watched countless musicals with their Disney-obsessed daughters?