My suspicion is something in the range or Cubic Kilometers per Second instead of CFM and if we're talking that much, what impact on our weather is there going to be with such a large fan running all the time?
It would seem to me that it ought to be about equal to how much air we blow around behind the rockets we currently use. In both cases we're pumping huge amounts of energy out and into the atmosphere, at least for the first few minutes after launch. However, if this is a more efficient system (and that's the whole point, ain't it?), it should have less impact on the weather than our current rockets do.
Failure to understand the processes necessary to get a good backup. (You can't just dump the files that comprise a database to disk - you must either quiesce the database or use the DBMS' inbuilt backup routine - or you will wind up with inconsistent files and hence an inconsistent database. You'd be amazed how many people don't understand this.)
Ha! Yup. I was working at a place once where we were discussing how backups were done, and this included backing up the database files while it was in-use. The senior engineer said this was okay since, yes there was a risk of problems, but at worst it would be like a power disconnect during db usage. Run the recovery program to fix any inconsistency like after an unscheduled power-cycle and all is good. Being junior and young, I just nodded and didn't give it another thought.
You ever wake up in the morning, not with that usual gradual pleasant return to consciousness, but a very sudden bolt-upright painful snap to consciousness, with certain understanding that something you did yesterday was horribly, horribly wrong, and you now understand completely what messed-up decision you made and just what kind of time-bomb you've left in your wake? XD
Luckily nothing happened before we started doing it right...
I think you missed GP's point. In the grand scheme of things, you're certainly correct, but again, in the context of commercial online journalism, is late really better than wrong?
What you've just posted a serious consequences for being wrong... for people other than those who stand to make a profit on a good headline. In other words, reasons that are commercially irrelevant to the people responsible for posting the good headline. You didn't post any reason why it's a bad idea for the journalists.
Not a troll. Genuinely curious what people think. My experiences with people is that they are terrified of the words "nuclear" or "radioactive" and have extremely irrational fears associated with them.
Oh please. We live in a country (well, many of us do) where the average man on the street is worried about Obama's death panels, and understand the teaching evolution in schools is part of a plot by our Kenyan-born Muslim president to brainwash people into accepting socialism, but are afraid to say too much or they'll be sent to one of the conservative concentration camps. And you're wondering if people will have irrational fears about radioactive material? XD
These researchers would like to see these in consumer level devices and don't expect someone to take one of these apart? Naive at best. Get out of the flippin' lab once in a while, guys.
Ah, yes, since a brief description in a BBC article fails to mention it, no doubt the researchers have never thought of these things. Luckily, your typical slashdot reader is far, far more intelligent and experienced on every issue than the people in the labs doing the research.
(I find your own naive assumptions quite amusing... XD)
For the pure analog phone signals, the Shannon limit is indeed 35k, and that was approximately the limit for V.34 modems. 56k PCM modems break the limit by assuming one end or the other (usually the ISP's end) is digitally terminated. If at least one end is digitally terminated, they can sync their signal with the digital phone network in a way that reduces quantization noise, and if you can reduce the noise, you increase the limit per Shannon's Theorem.
As black holes evaporate due to Hawking radiation, does that mean that they defeat the laws of thermodynamics in some way?
No.
Next question. Would quantum mechanics offer any explanation as to why we are less close to heat death than we think we should be?
Um, your question has too many false premises behind it to have a direct answer. We're closer to heat death than we thought we were. If there are people who think we are either closer or further away than we "should be", well, quantum mechanics might offer an explanation, or might not, depending on why the subject in question thinks things aren't the way they should be. You'd have to be more specific.
I believe firmly in evolution and the Big Bang and all that, but in order for the universe to have been created at some point, it's first generally necessary to prove that it has a finite age. The Second Law basically proves that quite nicely. So the Second Law isn't all that useless to the arsenal of Creationists.
Except, of course, it doesn't. The "heat death" of the universe does not prove the universe has a finite age, in fact quite the opposite, it would imply the universe will continue indefinitely. It's just that, for the vast majority of that infinite time, it will be in a very uninteresting state. It tells us what the "end state" of the universe will be, but reaching the end state of the universe is not the end of the universe, the universe goes on forever in its final state.
You seem to have started on 'aristocrat', gone via 'edwardian mill-owner' and ended up on 'hackney carriage driver'.
Yes, alas, a lot of Americans don't seem to grasp that there are many quite different British accents. It all gets lumped into one non-existent "British accent", presumably spoken by aristocratic Scottish chimney sweeps born to the sound of the Bow Bells in Victorian-era Calcutta, growing up as Oxford educated street urchins in the back-alleys of Serbiton and eventually settling down in the East End of Cardiff.
Obama is a realist. He knows that he's got to give up some control over the international ventures if he's going to expand his micro-management of every fuckin' US citizen's personal life.
His predecessor thought it was the government's job to tell me who I could or couldn't marry. I've actually never seen much in the way of micromanagement of people's lives from the D's, but the Republicans make it a point of making the most personal decisions in my life for me. If Republicans have their way, I can't even make personal decisions controlling my own body.
And why do they collide at an angle, because that definitely favors one style of construction over another - frame, engine placement, driver's side vs. passenger side, body materials, bumpers, etc.
Because in the real world, cars collide at an angle just short of 100% of the time. Getting an actual, straight, head-on collision is a very difficult task that requires a great deal of setup and effort on the part of the people doing the testing. In the real world, drivers don't arrange their crashes with such mathematical precision. "at an angle" is pretty much a given...
If NASA blew up three rockets in a row, they would be crucified by the press, and (more notably) by congress
Which highlights just how true the OP's point was. Slimming down NASA and moving this sort of thing into the realm of companies like SpaceX avoids the kind of congressional hand-wringing that's inevitable when you have NASA responsible for things, but the hand-wringing is utterly pointless. You don't get to space (and we're not there yet -- we've just stuck our toes in the water so far) by being the kind of people that are phobic of failure. You have to be willing to fail, and fail repeatedly, and keep going, if you're ultimately going to succeed.
But I don't think it's that great if their rocket succeeds because of good luck.
Maybe wish them "no bad luck";).
Amounts to the same thing. Bad luck can strike anyone, no matter how skilled, so it's good luck to not be struck by bad luck. The rest of your success is due to your own merits and work, but there's still the good luck of avoiding the bad beyond your control.
Download it first. If you like it, pay for it. If not, delete it.
If the game doesn't allow for that (say an online game with no free tryout period), then don't buy it. If the game is good, they'll want you to enjoy a free trial. That'll be their best sales tool, if it's good. The only reason to prevent you from trying before buying is because they know it sucks and you won't buy it unless it's a "pig in a poke"...
Only unit test what needs to be unit tested. If it needs to be tested the testing will pay for itself. If it's simple enough that it doesn't need testing, then you're wasting your time writing those tests.
...and writing the code to begin with. There is no such thing as code that was worth writing but is not worth testing.
The distinction between what you said is false and what you said is true would be lost on 95% of people. The other 5% note that you're absolutely right, and an annoying pedant.
Whatever the case, I'm really excited to see fatty acid extracts used instead of chemical compounds on the food that I eat.
You do realize that a fatty acid is a kind of chemical compound, right?
Most pesticides are compounds found in nature. They're only synthetic in that, after we've discovered that they're useful as pesticides, we've come up with ways to mass produce them without involving growing fields of flowers (or whatever) and extracting the material from them.
if we found an exoplanet, with earthlike environment that... would have interesting philosophical implications
I honestly can't think of any implications, if the planet is merely habitable. It wouldn't invalidate any religion I'm aware of.
Now if we found signs of life, even mundane life, we'd never hear the end of it. But it wouldn't affect me in the least because my religion already teaches that there are uncountable worlds similar to Earth (I'm LDS).
Um, can you name a religion that insists there is no life on other planets? I'm not aware of any, and I have a fairly broad and reasonably deep knowledge of a number of different religions.
Wait... how does that work? Assuming you're not using the sun, how does half an hour help you figure out which way is North?
I think what he means here is (guessing based on the fact that I'm mostly the same), you can figure it out pretty much instantly (and he probably is using the sun), it just takes a half hour before you "just know" rather than have to stop and figure it out. When you're like this, you don't stop and examine the sun position or whatever to determine which way is north, it's just more of a constant awareness of the fact, almost a physical feeling of "northness" in a given direction. It takes about a half hour after you arrive someplace new before this "sense" kicks in. Until then, you have to stop and think about it rather than it being a continuous, automatic awareness.
So Green Dam was an influence and not a hindrance?
Given that anything that is a hindrance is an influence (by definition), why would you conclude that it wasn't a hindrance based on the fact that it was an influence? That's a bit like me saying, "I ate a sandwich," and you responding with "So you had a sandwich and not a roast beef sandwich?" Nothing in what I said implied it wasn't roast beef. Nothing in the originally quoted sentence implies it wasn't a hindrance.
Slashdot Mirror
My suspicion is something in the range or Cubic Kilometers per Second instead of CFM and if we're talking that much, what impact on our weather is there going to be with such a large fan running all the time?
It would seem to me that it ought to be about equal to how much air we blow around behind the rockets we currently use. In both cases we're pumping huge amounts of energy out and into the atmosphere, at least for the first few minutes after launch. However, if this is a more efficient system (and that's the whole point, ain't it?), it should have less impact on the weather than our current rockets do.
Smile, hell, I can't get any work done until joe is installed...
Failure to understand the processes necessary to get a good backup. (You can't just dump the files that comprise a database to disk - you must either quiesce the database or use the DBMS' inbuilt backup routine - or you will wind up with inconsistent files and hence an inconsistent database. You'd be amazed how many people don't understand this.)
Ha! Yup. I was working at a place once where we were discussing how backups were done, and this included backing up the database files while it was in-use. The senior engineer said this was okay since, yes there was a risk of problems, but at worst it would be like a power disconnect during db usage. Run the recovery program to fix any inconsistency like after an unscheduled power-cycle and all is good. Being junior and young, I just nodded and didn't give it another thought.
You ever wake up in the morning, not with that usual gradual pleasant return to consciousness, but a very sudden bolt-upright painful snap to consciousness, with certain understanding that something you did yesterday was horribly, horribly wrong, and you now understand completely what messed-up decision you made and just what kind of time-bomb you've left in your wake? XD
Luckily nothing happened before we started doing it right...
I think you missed GP's point. In the grand scheme of things, you're certainly correct, but again, in the context of commercial online journalism, is late really better than wrong?
What you've just posted a serious consequences for being wrong... for people other than those who stand to make a profit on a good headline. In other words, reasons that are commercially irrelevant to the people responsible for posting the good headline. You didn't post any reason why it's a bad idea for the journalists.
Not a troll. Genuinely curious what people think. My experiences with people is that they are terrified of the words "nuclear" or "radioactive" and have extremely irrational fears associated with them.
Oh please. We live in a country (well, many of us do) where the average man on the street is worried about Obama's death panels, and understand the teaching evolution in schools is part of a plot by our Kenyan-born Muslim president to brainwash people into accepting socialism, but are afraid to say too much or they'll be sent to one of the conservative concentration camps. And you're wondering if people will have irrational fears about radioactive material? XD
These researchers would like to see these in consumer level devices and don't expect someone to take one of these apart? Naive at best. Get out of the flippin' lab once in a while, guys.
Ah, yes, since a brief description in a BBC article fails to mention it, no doubt the researchers have never thought of these things. Luckily, your typical slashdot reader is far, far more intelligent and experienced on every issue than the people in the labs doing the research.
(I find your own naive assumptions quite amusing... XD)
You overestimate the determination of terrorists.
...
It's hard to overestimate the determination of someone willing to blow himself up to make a point.
For the pure analog phone signals, the Shannon limit is indeed 35k, and that was approximately the limit for V.34 modems. 56k PCM modems break the limit by assuming one end or the other (usually the ISP's end) is digitally terminated. If at least one end is digitally terminated, they can sync their signal with the digital phone network in a way that reduces quantization noise, and if you can reduce the noise, you increase the limit per Shannon's Theorem.
... Running ECC performs a basic parity check, nothing more...
Not exactly...
As black holes evaporate due to Hawking radiation, does that mean that they defeat the laws of thermodynamics in some way?
No.
Next question. Would quantum mechanics offer any explanation as to why we are less close to heat death than we think we should be?
Um, your question has too many false premises behind it to have a direct answer. We're closer to heat death than we thought we were. If there are people who think we are either closer or further away than we "should be", well, quantum mechanics might offer an explanation, or might not, depending on why the subject in question thinks things aren't the way they should be. You'd have to be more specific.
I believe firmly in evolution and the Big Bang and all that, but in order for the universe to have been created at some point, it's first generally necessary to prove that it has a finite age. The Second Law basically proves that quite nicely. So the Second Law isn't all that useless to the arsenal of Creationists.
Except, of course, it doesn't. The "heat death" of the universe does not prove the universe has a finite age, in fact quite the opposite, it would imply the universe will continue indefinitely. It's just that, for the vast majority of that infinite time, it will be in a very uninteresting state. It tells us what the "end state" of the universe will be, but reaching the end state of the universe is not the end of the universe, the universe goes on forever in its final state.
You seem to have started on 'aristocrat', gone via 'edwardian mill-owner' and ended up on 'hackney carriage driver'.
Yes, alas, a lot of Americans don't seem to grasp that there are many quite different British accents. It all gets lumped into one non-existent "British accent", presumably spoken by aristocratic Scottish chimney sweeps born to the sound of the Bow Bells in Victorian-era Calcutta, growing up as Oxford educated street urchins in the back-alleys of Serbiton and eventually settling down in the East End of Cardiff.
Obama is a realist. He knows that he's got to give up some control over the international ventures if he's going to expand his micro-management of every fuckin' US citizen's personal life.
His predecessor thought it was the government's job to tell me who I could or couldn't marry. I've actually never seen much in the way of micromanagement of people's lives from the D's, but the Republicans make it a point of making the most personal decisions in my life for me. If Republicans have their way, I can't even make personal decisions controlling my own body.
And why do they collide at an angle, because that definitely favors one style of construction over another - frame, engine placement, driver's side vs. passenger side, body materials, bumpers, etc.
Because in the real world, cars collide at an angle just short of 100% of the time. Getting an actual, straight, head-on collision is a very difficult task that requires a great deal of setup and effort on the part of the people doing the testing. In the real world, drivers don't arrange their crashes with such mathematical precision. "at an angle" is pretty much a given...
If NASA blew up three rockets in a row, they would be crucified by the press, and (more notably) by congress
Which highlights just how true the OP's point was. Slimming down NASA and moving this sort of thing into the realm of companies like SpaceX avoids the kind of congressional hand-wringing that's inevitable when you have NASA responsible for things, but the hand-wringing is utterly pointless. You don't get to space (and we're not there yet -- we've just stuck our toes in the water so far) by being the kind of people that are phobic of failure. You have to be willing to fail, and fail repeatedly, and keep going, if you're ultimately going to succeed.
But I don't think it's that great if their rocket succeeds because of good luck. Maybe wish them "no bad luck" ;).
Amounts to the same thing. Bad luck can strike anyone, no matter how skilled, so it's good luck to not be struck by bad luck. The rest of your success is due to your own merits and work, but there's still the good luck of avoiding the bad beyond your control.
... I usually buy candy/popcorn and lemonade and other things too. ...
Note the correction, turning a false and ridiculous statement into a true one.
Download it first. If you like it, pay for it. If not, delete it.
If the game doesn't allow for that (say an online game with no free tryout period), then don't buy it. If the game is good, they'll want you to enjoy a free trial. That'll be their best sales tool, if it's good. The only reason to prevent you from trying before buying is because they know it sucks and you won't buy it unless it's a "pig in a poke"...
Only unit test what needs to be unit tested. If it needs to be tested the testing will pay for itself. If it's simple enough that it doesn't need testing, then you're wasting your time writing those tests.
...and writing the code to begin with. There is no such thing as code that was worth writing but is not worth testing.
if ( a >= 90 && a < 10 ) printf("You're right.");
The distinction between what you said is false and what you said is true would be lost on 95% of people. The other 5% note that you're absolutely right, and an annoying pedant.
Whatever the case, I'm really excited to see fatty acid extracts used instead of chemical compounds on the food that I eat.
You do realize that a fatty acid is a kind of chemical compound, right?
Most pesticides are compounds found in nature. They're only synthetic in that, after we've discovered that they're useful as pesticides, we've come up with ways to mass produce them without involving growing fields of flowers (or whatever) and extracting the material from them.
That is odd I use my boat for recreation but it doesn't qualify as a RV. I use my off road rigs for recreation too. Someone care to explain?
Starfish aren't fish, either, and you park on driveways and drive on parkways. It's called language. Get used to it...
if we found an exoplanet, with earthlike environment that ... would have interesting philosophical implications
I honestly can't think of any implications, if the planet is merely habitable. It wouldn't invalidate any religion I'm aware of.
Now if we found signs of life, even mundane life, we'd never hear the end of it. But it wouldn't affect me in the least because my religion already teaches that there are uncountable worlds similar to Earth (I'm LDS).
Um, can you name a religion that insists there is no life on other planets? I'm not aware of any, and I have a fairly broad and reasonably deep knowledge of a number of different religions.
Wait... how does that work? Assuming you're not using the sun, how does half an hour help you figure out which way is North?
I think what he means here is (guessing based on the fact that I'm mostly the same), you can figure it out pretty much instantly (and he probably is using the sun), it just takes a half hour before you "just know" rather than have to stop and figure it out. When you're like this, you don't stop and examine the sun position or whatever to determine which way is north, it's just more of a constant awareness of the fact, almost a physical feeling of "northness" in a given direction. It takes about a half hour after you arrive someplace new before this "sense" kicks in. Until then, you have to stop and think about it rather than it being a continuous, automatic awareness.
So Green Dam was an influence and not a hindrance?
Given that anything that is a hindrance is an influence (by definition), why would you conclude that it wasn't a hindrance based on the fact that it was an influence? That's a bit like me saying, "I ate a sandwich," and you responding with "So you had a sandwich and not a roast beef sandwich?" Nothing in what I said implied it wasn't roast beef. Nothing in the originally quoted sentence implies it wasn't a hindrance.