Well, I was going for firsts. If you want to count numbers, I'm not sure, but I suspect only a microbiologist would recognize the species that has had the largest number of members in space...
And now that I think about, they should share with dogs the honor of being among the first species into space, well before any human...
I've always found the Russian approach to space pretty amazing. For all our (American) rhetoric about safety, the Russians have, and probably always have had during the entire history of space exploration, the most reliable spacecraft. I'd feel far safer in a Russian craft than any American one. It's not that things never go wrong, but when things go wrong on a Russian craft, they generally don't suffer catostrophic failure. I'm trying to find the word that makes me fear American spacecraft: would it be overengineered? They're way more complex than they need to be to do the job they need to do. I believe NASA thinks its mission is to push new technology forward, rather than solve specific problems (like how to put a man on the moon or make a reusable spacecraft) -- but is that really what we ought to be doing? Are we busy churning out American dreams while pragmatic Russians are staying focused on the problem at hand?
Sometimes I wish the Soviets would have gotten to the Moon first because then Americans wouldn't have had any other choice but to put a man on Mars to save face.
Indeed, the Soviets had a long string of "firsts" -- we were the underdog until we landed on the moon.
Fact of the matter is, the USA sucks when it's in first place. We're really only any good when we're the underdog. Someone has to surpass us before we start thinking about putting down the McCheeseburger, getting out of the Lay-Z-Boy, and actually doing something great with our lives.
Lynn Margulis (famous microbiologist [and first wife of astronomer Carl Sagan, incidently]) wrote an article about what she rates as the five most dramatic steps forward in the evolution of life on Earth. I don't remember the whole list off the top of my head, but it included things like "motility" (going from just floating to moving under ones own control is a far bigger advance than, say, flying, which is just a refinement of motility). All five were not the result of competition but cooperation between formerly seperate organisms. Cooperation has brought about the biggest advances in evolution, competition has done nothing but refine the efficiency of existing designs...
Want to totally disrupt the whole China putting men on the moon thing? NASA should return to the moon. About two months before the Chinese are about to make their first manned landing on the moon, NASA successfully lands on the moon with a crew that includes one Chinese man. Heh heh heh...
... First Post about Microsoft/Windows in a story that has nothing to do with it...
Every story has something to do with Microsoft. Even stories you find on microfiche in the library from newspapers printed in 1904. See Dirk Gentley's Holistic Detective Agency...
We all stand on the shoulders of giants. Anyone who owns a business not built on other people's innovations isn't likely to be selling anything of worth...
There weren't really any home computers until I was in high school. By then I had already taken a bunch of penmanship classes. If learning to use a keyboard ruins people's ability to hold a pencil, does learning to use a pencil ruin people's ability to type? I wonder if I can sue my former gradeschools for the fact that I only do 60 WPM whereas I'd be able to type much more quickly if they hadn't ruined me as a typist. That's a lost job skill, no?
Go make some drivers and STFU. Then you might realize that writing drivers takes effort.
Are you replying to the correct article? Where did the person you are replying to say or imply writing drivers was effortless?
Also, read the article. ATI was "examining" the drivers when they found the cheat. What, does nVidia want to make it easier for them to reverse-engineer by providing full source / specs?
That would not be the goal nVidia would be shooting for, rather an unfortunate side-effect, but yes, absolutely, this is something nVidia should want done. Did you read the article? Did you notice the blatantly obvious fact that hiding their source code did not in any way prevent ATI from reverse-engineering their drivers? So what benefit do they get from hiding the source? (Actually, one fairly obvious one -- it allows them to easily hide the fact they're cheating on benchmarks. But assuming everything was on the up and up, what would the benefit be?)
Think a little before whining.
A little more politeness would go over better, especially when it's your own post doesn't seem to have been fully thought through...
Of course, for most people, all the links above deliver you to a login page. Having to login to post is sensible. Having to login to read is moronic. Of course, one can always be a cipherpunk...
can't speak to Plato, but I don't think there was a lot of cross-pollination between East and West that far back
I would tend to agree, but there is a good case to be made for that (a) Pythagoras got some of his ideas from visiting India, and (b) Plato got some of his ideas from the Pythagoreans. So in this case, it's not an unreasonable hypothesis...
Re:Props to Linus
on
Linus on DRM
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· Score: 2, Insightful
In America the last presidential election was about 50/50 republican/democrat; so I don't see why you think liberalism has lost its relevancy.
Uh... that doesn't make any sense.
Oh wait! I see. You think one of those two parties still represents liberalism... You want to know how relevant liberalism is in America today, look at how many votes were cast for Ralph Nader...
Because they switched operating systems (from MacOS to NextStep), and their new OS never had that feature. It wasn't dropped, just never added.
The problem you talk about is easily solvable by simply having a default app for filetypes when you don't have the creator. Or give a list of existing apps that can handle that kind of app when you double click on this. There was an extension for System 7 that did this IIRC...
"Anyone who would sacrifice liberty for security deserves neither."
"Live free or die."
Alas, Americans of today are nothing like the patriots who founded this country.
They kill our people, we take their oil.
Who is this "they" you are talking about? Because a group of people who were mostly from Saudi Arabia killed some Americans, we're taking oil from Iraq? And this makes sense to you? If the French engage in unfair competition, should we impose trade sanctions on Spain? I don't get it. What does 9/11 have to do with Iraqi oil?
After all, it's not like we had a choice when they took our people, why should we ask them for their oil?
First of all, we can't ask the people who took our people for anything, they're dead. Why this justifies taking oil from some completely different set of people is a mystery to me. Secondly, I fail to see how the fact that someone else has committed a crime makes it okay for me to commit one.
And you definitely should do some thinking before you post again.
You should definately try thinking sometime. Try using a little logic while you're at it for a change.
Even worse, the smaller a black hole gets, the more quickly it loses mass, which causes to get smaller even more quickly, which causes it to loose mass even more quickly, etc. Thus, in its final moments, the "evaporation" of a tiny black hole would be at a speed that might be better characterized as "explosion".
BTW, text books say the "everything" are only mass and angular momentum. But if this is true, as "all the information of the matter fall onto the black hole will be loss save the mass and angular momentum", then the history of the black hole shall went down the sink as well and the claims that stars formed black holes shall become automatically invalidated.
No? Enlighten me, please.
If a great battle is fought on a beach, but over time the arrowheads are ground into sand, the shafts rot away, and at some future point, no evidence is left at the beach that the battle occured, in fact random motion of the sand particles eventually reaches a point where it might have come had no battle occured, do statements such as "A battle occured here" cease to be true? Or simply become unprovable?
If your answer is the former, then yes, you are correct. If your answer is the latter, then no, these claims are not automatically invalidated. An inability to determine the truth of a statement does not mean that the statement is neither true nor false, just that we don't know which.
Err, no. Volume varies as the cube of the radius. Mass at a constant density would as well, but then we're definately not talking about black holes, degenerate matter, or indeed any mass large enough to suffer compression under its own weight.
"Proxima" is not an official designation. I believe the proper name for Proxima is "Alpha Centauri C" (it being the third in that particular trinary system).
Slashdot Mirror
And now that I think about, they should share with dogs the honor of being among the first species into space, well before any human...
I've always found the Russian approach to space pretty amazing. For all our (American) rhetoric about safety, the Russians have, and probably always have had during the entire history of space exploration, the most reliable spacecraft. I'd feel far safer in a Russian craft than any American one. It's not that things never go wrong, but when things go wrong on a Russian craft, they generally don't suffer catostrophic failure. I'm trying to find the word that makes me fear American spacecraft: would it be overengineered? They're way more complex than they need to be to do the job they need to do. I believe NASA thinks its mission is to push new technology forward, rather than solve specific problems (like how to put a man on the moon or make a reusable spacecraft) -- but is that really what we ought to be doing? Are we busy churning out American dreams while pragmatic Russians are staying focused on the problem at hand?
Indeed, the Soviets had a long string of "firsts" -- we were the underdog until we landed on the moon.
Fact of the matter is, the USA sucks when it's in first place. We're really only any good when we're the underdog. Someone has to surpass us before we start thinking about putting down the McCheeseburger, getting out of the Lay-Z-Boy, and actually doing something great with our lives.
Indeed. However, the universiality of the laws of physics makes a much more convincing explanation than all the other stuff you went on about.
And why would I be bothered by the fact that someone else has succeeded?
Personally, I hope others succeed. The more they do, the more likely I do as well...
Lynn Margulis (famous microbiologist [and first wife of astronomer Carl Sagan, incidently]) wrote an article about what she rates as the five most dramatic steps forward in the evolution of life on Earth. I don't remember the whole list off the top of my head, but it included things like "motility" (going from just floating to moving under ones own control is a far bigger advance than, say, flying, which is just a refinement of motility). All five were not the result of competition but cooperation between formerly seperate organisms. Cooperation has brought about the biggest advances in evolution, competition has done nothing but refine the efficiency of existing designs...
Want to totally disrupt the whole China putting men on the moon thing? NASA should return to the moon. About two months before the Chinese are about to make their first manned landing on the moon, NASA successfully lands on the moon with a crew that includes one Chinese man. Heh heh heh...
...and it should of course be noted that dogs made it into space before humans.
Except, of course, for the management at Xerox...
Every story has something to do with Microsoft. Even stories you find on microfiche in the library from newspapers printed in 1904. See Dirk Gentley's Holistic Detective Agency...
We all stand on the shoulders of giants. Anyone who owns a business not built on other people's innovations isn't likely to be selling anything of worth...
Well, if our thumbs were not opposable, I guess we'd just have to do everything they wanted without question...
There weren't really any home computers until I was in high school. By then I had already taken a bunch of penmanship classes. If learning to use a keyboard ruins people's ability to hold a pencil, does learning to use a pencil ruin people's ability to type? I wonder if I can sue my former gradeschools for the fact that I only do 60 WPM whereas I'd be able to type much more quickly if they hadn't ruined me as a typist. That's a lost job skill, no?
Are you replying to the correct article? Where did the person you are replying to say or imply writing drivers was effortless?
Also, read the article. ATI was "examining" the drivers when they found the cheat. What, does nVidia want to make it easier for them to reverse-engineer by providing full source / specs?
That would not be the goal nVidia would be shooting for, rather an unfortunate side-effect, but yes, absolutely, this is something nVidia should want done. Did you read the article? Did you notice the blatantly obvious fact that hiding their source code did not in any way prevent ATI from reverse-engineering their drivers? So what benefit do they get from hiding the source? (Actually, one fairly obvious one -- it allows them to easily hide the fact they're cheating on benchmarks. But assuming everything was on the up and up, what would the benefit be?)
Think a little before whining.
A little more politeness would go over better, especially when it's your own post doesn't seem to have been fully thought through...
Of course, for most people, all the links above deliver you to a login page. Having to login to post is sensible. Having to login to read is moronic. Of course, one can always be a cipherpunk...
I would tend to agree, but there is a good case to be made for that (a) Pythagoras got some of his ideas from visiting India, and (b) Plato got some of his ideas from the Pythagoreans. So in this case, it's not an unreasonable hypothesis...
Uh... that doesn't make any sense.
Oh wait! I see. You think one of those two parties still represents liberalism... You want to know how relevant liberalism is in America today, look at how many votes were cast for Ralph Nader...
Well, the first part of your answer is reasonable...
But them I'm an irrational Pyrrhonist, so what do I know?
The problem you talk about is easily solvable by simply having a default app for filetypes when you don't have the creator. Or give a list of existing apps that can handle that kind of app when you double click on this. There was an extension for System 7 that did this IIRC...
"Anyone who would sacrifice liberty for security deserves neither."
"Live free or die."
Alas, Americans of today are nothing like the patriots who founded this country.
They kill our people, we take their oil.
Who is this "they" you are talking about? Because a group of people who were mostly from Saudi Arabia killed some Americans, we're taking oil from Iraq? And this makes sense to you? If the French engage in unfair competition, should we impose trade sanctions on Spain? I don't get it. What does 9/11 have to do with Iraqi oil?
After all, it's not like we had a choice when they took our people, why should we ask them for their oil?
First of all, we can't ask the people who took our people for anything, they're dead. Why this justifies taking oil from some completely different set of people is a mystery to me. Secondly, I fail to see how the fact that someone else has committed a crime makes it okay for me to commit one.
And you definitely should do some thinking before you post again.
You should definately try thinking sometime. Try using a little logic while you're at it for a change.
Well, in their case, it's a black mass... :)
Even worse, the smaller a black hole gets, the more quickly it loses mass, which causes to get smaller even more quickly, which causes it to loose mass even more quickly, etc. Thus, in its final moments, the "evaporation" of a tiny black hole would be at a speed that might be better characterized as "explosion".
No? Enlighten me, please.
If a great battle is fought on a beach, but over time the arrowheads are ground into sand, the shafts rot away, and at some future point, no evidence is left at the beach that the battle occured, in fact random motion of the sand particles eventually reaches a point where it might have come had no battle occured, do statements such as "A battle occured here" cease to be true? Or simply become unprovable?
If your answer is the former, then yes, you are correct. If your answer is the latter, then no, these claims are not automatically invalidated. An inability to determine the truth of a statement does not mean that the statement is neither true nor false, just that we don't know which.
Err, no. Volume varies as the cube of the radius. Mass at a constant density would as well, but then we're definately not talking about black holes, degenerate matter, or indeed any mass large enough to suffer compression under its own weight.
"Proxima" is not an official designation. I believe the proper name for Proxima is "Alpha Centauri C" (it being the third in that particular trinary system).