Um, I seem to remember several bits of dialog (in BG) about getting "bullets" and such. It looked like the capital ship relied on a hail of small kinetic kill projectiles as point defense.
The original posting was talking about space fighters. The point-defense systems on the Galactica did appear to be either mass drivers or some kind of mini-missile system (from the 'tracers'), though. It didn't seem to me that the Vipers had a projectile-based main weapons system, because we a) never saw any scenes of them arming a Viper's main weapons, and b) with the Galactica being slated for decommissioning, and the Viper Mk.IIs being museum exhibits, you wouldn't expect that they'd keep any ammunition around -- they'd have had to go to Ragnar to arm both the Galactica and the Vipers. But from what we saw, they just had to get the systems functional on the Vipers, without needing ammo loadouts; that implies that the Viper's main weapons are energy-based, driven off the fighters' engine systems.
But my understanding is that they've still got space fighters. If that's so, and no one's thought to use serious kinetic kill weapons, I suspect that there's some laws of physics being broken somewhere.
In that regard, the 'Wing Commander' games and movie were better, in that the mass driver cannon were one of the most effective weapons if you could hit with them -- but they sucked energy to run. However, in Battlestar Galactica, it appeared that for small-craft weapons you pretty much had a choice between missiles and some kind of plasma-in-a-magnetic-bottle weapon. For missiles, a kinetic-kill system is kind of pointless -- even air-to-air missiles today don't rely on the missile itself actually hitting its target -- so a high-explosive or small nuke warhead is what you'd expect to see.
I expect that we're never going to get told why neither side uses kinetic-kill systems for the fighters' primary weapons, although I would guess that an energy weapon will have a point at which the 'projectile' dissipates; a kinetic-kill weapon in space would keep going, producing widely-ranging hazard zones from old battles.
I guess what I am getting at, is that there is rampant patenting taking place with few significant things to show for it. Chemists patent anything and everything they can in the off-chance that someone will use it in an industrial process.
One idea that could be a step toward a fix for this problem -- and it's not just with chemistry patents -- is to require that a company holding a patent actually be using that patent in a product. It's not an ironclad solution, nor does it solve all of the problems with patents, but it does eliminate the 'patent it just in case we can get someone to pay to license it some time in the future' attitude, as well as eliminating companies that exist only as licensing houses for a stable of patents, producing nothing themselves.
Anyone know anything about this two-sun theory? I have never heard of this and it seems rather bizarre to me. I'm disappointed that the review doesn't say what the theory is.
IIRC, it's also known as the 'Nemesis' theory -- that the Sun has a brown dwarf companion with an orbit that takes it through our Oort cloud to perturb orbits of comets and asteroids into the inner Solar System at intervals matching the observed periodicity (I think it's supposed to be around 26 megayears) of mass extinctions. There is an article about it here.
So what ? Television can sustain itself without the revenue from advertising ? Then too bad for the broadcasters, but they don't have a protected right to a profitable state of business. I, for one, am looking forward to the death of advertisement.
"There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary public interest." -- Robert A. Heinlein
I really don't understand Heinlein in your last point.
The point I was making is that you can't make predictions that involve a fundamental paradigm shift from your knowlege. Heinlein knew about digital computers, and he could see that digital computers were better for crunching numerical data (you try dialing in 37d14m32s on an analog input device reliably). But he didn't have the knowledge to see where solid-state circuitry could be taken, so while he did make evolutionary predictions about other technologies, he believed digital computers would remain large, special-purpose, and difficult to get information in and out of, based on the limitations of the technology he was familiar with. Other writers, lacking any familiarity with computers, were able to ignore the limits that projecting current technology would have imposed, and made wilder projections that, in fact, more closely matched the actual advance of technology.
Predictions about the advance of a technology only work well as long as that advance occurs along an evolutionary path; as soon as it involves a revolutionary jump, 'predictions' become no more than WAGs (Wild-Ass Guesses).
If you look at the patterns of technological predictions that have failed, they tend to cluster into several groups, such as:
1) Lack of advances with energy storage. For all the technological advances elsewhere, a tank full of gasoline or jet fuel is still one of the densest energy storage media known.
2) Lack of advances with energy production. Going along with the previous limitation, many of the glowing predictions for the future involved each individual's having access to -- either directly or indirectly for manufacturing purposes -- many times more energy than they do now, for much less money. Nuclear power was supposed to be the genie of infinite energy -- but that hope died with Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. How many people remember the NS Savannah?
3) Cultural shifts. Look at the images of the Family of Tomorrow, living in the City of Tomorrow. Aside from clothing, they were identical to the popular image of the ideal family, living in the idealized Suburbia. You got in your aircar and flew to work, your wife zapped dinner from frozen to steaming in seconds, their home would be made entirely of synthetic materials -- but society still had all the same values. Ignoring for the moment that this was the white, middle-class future (turning a blind eye to the race-based inequities of current society), the society that made these predictions was, on the whole, considerably more responsible than today's society. The predictions expected that, with the advances in technology, mankind would become rational, well-educated, and responsible, able to face the challenge of a sky filled with aircars and devise a solution that everyone would agree on. Now contrast this with the people you see around you on the roads, and imagine what things would be like if they had three dimensions to be stupid with.
4) Modern business management. How long do you keep throwing money into a project before you expect to get a return? For many years, this was the single biggest advantage Japanese business had over American business -- they were willing to engage in R&D programs that wouldn't even begin to pay off for a decade or more, while in the US, an R&D program that wouldn't pay for itself in two years already had two-and-a-half strikes against it with management. Business practices have improved, but research programs that don't have a hope in hell of paying off in less than twenty years, or which, despite producing results quickly, will be hugely expensive without producing anything marketable, fall by the wayside in the eternal chase for the almighty Bottom Line. And even governments, with the ever-increasing amount of panis et circenses, err, entitlement programs, are finding it harder and harder to commit the money that such research requires, particularly when failure -- or repeated failure that is inevitable in research -- constitutes grounds for yanking your funding.
5) Paradigm shifts. People make predictions by extending what they already know; they can't predict changes that alter the underlying premises upon which those predictions are made. Technological advances can go off into directions that render a prediction useless. For example, Robert Heinlein, one of the world's most renowned science-fiction writers, described fusion-driven starships -- torchships -- that were navigated by teams of astrogators taking star sights by hand, manually converting the sight data into binary using large reference books, entering this binary data into a huge computer (again, manually) that crunched the sight data, returned a solution that had to be (manually) converted back from binary, and then applied to the engines. That was Heinlein's experience with computers; that was how he predicted their future. The invention of integrated circuits and the microcomputer rendered that prediction ludicrously anachronistic, as if you went into an FAA control tower and found the air-traffic controllers guiding planes by pushing little model planes around on a map, a la RAF Fighter Command in WWII.
Sure speed is a problem, but why do people take 7 day crusies around a few caribbean islands? Airship travel is definately a cool way to go! Especially in our uber-busy society. I could see airship travel being a great passtime in the US if it got cheap enough.
I have no idea where I read this originally, but I remember a line I read several decades ago -- a quote from a blimp pilot that exemplifies that concept:
"I don't care how many years you've been flying, you'll never see an airplane stop just to get a better look at the sharks."
I don't doubt the cloth being so 'explosive' had a lot to do with the disaster, and even if the Hindenburg was filled with helium, the cloth burning would have been enough to bring down the thing. But to say that it was all the cloth, and the hydrogen didn't contribute, to me is moronic.
The point is that the fire began with the ignition of the doped skin of the Hindenberg, not with the ignition of the hydrogen in the lift cells. If you watch the film, you'll notice that the Hindenberg remains floating until a large part of the stern is aflame, at which point the stern begins to drop -- a situation consonant with the conflagration spreading along the skin until the heat and flames rupture the lift cells, at which point the hydrogen would rise, burning at the hydrogen/air interface without ever achieving the requisite mixture required for it to explode. The blue flames from the burning hydrogen are drowned out by the orange flames of the burning skin of the airship, which is why you can't see them on the film.
The hydrogen contributed to the crash; the rupture of the lift cells deprived the Hindenberg of the lift it needed to remain aloft, and the heat from the burning hydrogen no doubt contributed to the weakening of the airframe. Given the structural and weight limitations of a lighter-than-air vessel, even had the lift gas been helium, once the fire had begun to rupture the lift cells, the vessel was doomed; impact with the ground due to loss of lift would crush the dirigible's frame. However, it is likely that the aluminum paint the skin of the airship was doped with was the proximate cause of the disaster; had it been skinned with a material that was not pyrotechnic, the discharge that ignited the skin of the Hindenberg would merely have burned a rip in the skin, rather than lighting a fuse that would burn through the whole vessel.
Tell you what. Let them genetically engineer hemp to exclude THC and physically alter the color/shape of the plant so it is easily distinguishable and then I'm all for legalizing it.
Until then the social issues that THC brings about is hardly worth the benefits of another source of soap.
What 'social issues that THC brings about'? Or have you bought into the propaganda campaign that goes back to 1895, when William Randolph Hearst started a 30-year propaganda campaign denouncing Spaniards, Mexican-Americans and Latinos, portraying Mexicans as lazy pot-smoking layabouts after the marijuana-smoking army of Pancho Villa seized 800,000 acres of prime Mexican timberland Hearst owned, which he harvested to make pulp paper to print his newspapers? Go look at the history of marijuana criminalization; you'll find it filled with unsubstantiated claims, gross exaggerations, and outright lies.
Before the Civil War, hemp was widely grown, but the process of separating the pulp from the fiber was hugely labor-intensive, only cost-effective using slaves, so after slavery was abolished, even though an acre of hemp produced four times the paper pulp that an acre of timberland would, it was much less expensive to log the timber than to process the hemp. The invention of the Schlichten decorticator changed that; a simple mechanical device allowed fast and easy separation of pulp from fiber. DuPont, Hearst, and their associates lobbied and conspired to crush the competition posed by hemp, and they succeeded. For example, from 1935 to 1937, I.I. DuPont personally lobbied the chief counsel of the Treasury Department, Herman Oliphant, and repeatedly assured him that DuPont's synthetic petrochemicals (i.e., urethane), could replace hempseed oil in the marketplace. Some large pharmaceutical companies also stood to gain by the criminalization of cannabis, since their patented prescription tranquilizers (barbituates, etc) would replace cannabis to some extent.
Public perception of hemp after 1915 was strongly influenced by numerous newspaper and magazine articles that ascribed every evil to the ifluence of marijuana, just as opium and cocaine had been demonized and vilified years before. Other racists with pretensions to "Keep America American" were happy to ride the bandwagon driven by Hearst's yellow journalism. The attitude of C. M. Goethe, a prominent member of the American Coalition, was typical:
"Marijuana, perhaps now the most insidious of our narcotics, is a direct by-product of unrestricted Mexican immigration. Easily grown, it has been asserted that it has recently been planted between rows in a California penitentiary garden. Mexican peddlers have been caught distributing sample marihuana cigarets to school children. Bills for our quota against Mexico have been blocked mysteriously in every Congress since the 1924 Quota Act. Our nation has more than enough laborers.
Over the years, marijuana got blamed for crime and violence among Mexicans and blacks in states along the border with Mexico. Hearst used his chain of newspapers to continuously publish hate-mongering racist articles that fueled America's xenophobia with terrifying headlines such as: "Marihuana Makes Fiends of Boys in 30 Days: Hashish Goads Users to Blood-Lust!", "New Dope Lure, Marihuana, Has Many Victims", "Hotel Clerk Identifies Marihuana Smoker as 'Wild Gunman' Arrested for Shootings". A spate of articles that appeared in popular magazines featured titles such as "Marihuana -- Assassin of Youth" (American Magazine), "Sex Crazing Drug Menace" (Physical Culture), and "Youth Gone Loco" (Christian Century). Amongst the dreadful effects attributed to "The Menace of Marihuana" in the International Medical Digest, there was a particularly tragic case: "A boy and a girl who had lost their sense so completely after smoking marihuana eloped and were married."
The game was made primarly as a graphics demo for NVIDIA cards. It makes sense, then, that it should be for NVIDIA cards, no?
Given that nVidia has tweaked its drivers specifically to make the drivers aware of when the computer was running 3DMark 2003, in order to use specially-optimized code specific to the 3DMark tests to boost its cards' benchmark scores, I'm not surprised that nVidia decided to bankroll development of software to show off its cards... certainly the benchmarks don't show them in a particularly good light...
Truly a most amazing yacht... looking at the design, one can't help but think about the cruising and parties under the sea that this would afford.
Unfortunately, it's not likely that anyone rich enough to be able to afford to buy one is going to have the kind of romance in their soul that would be necessary for them to tell US Subs to do the interior in brass, walnut, and rich fabrics to create a modern-day Nautilus (Captain Nemo's, not the US Navy's, for those of you who were never exposed to 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea).
I think that George O. Smith's Venus Equilateral story "Pandora's Millions" predated Damon Knight's story; The Complete Venus Equilateral dates from about 1945. In it, the invention of the duplicator causes a societal collapse, as the first people to get duplicators make copies of their money, gold, and jewels, and later as anyone with a household replicator and a set of pattern discs is functionally independent for the basic necessities (duplicate yourself a fresh set of batteries when the old ones get low).
However, a society based on service value (you can't duplicate medical care, and a personal replicator can't build you a home) keeps things from falling into total chaos until the VE researchers come up with materials that cannot be scanned by the duplicator. These materials are used for money, and for packaging 'Certified Originals' -- objects that have never been scanned for duplication.
The VE stories also raise another societal issue that replicators would cause that many other stories, including Star Trek, never addressed. The VE duplicator can duplicate living material; it becomes the accepted medical practice, when faced with an extremely complicated or risky case where even the slightest mistake in treatment would kill the patient, to create as many duplicates of the patient as necessary, performing the treatment or surgery over and over again, until the physicians are able to treat the condition successfully, after which the real patient is treated the same way. This does, of course, leave the physicians in the position of having to dispose of the cured duplicate.
The ability to create duplicates of living things also establishes 'duplicate' as an epithet when used to another person, which creates a social stigma against twins.
The rumors of a thousand ill-informed people do not add up to the knowledge of a single well-informed person.
It is perhaps amusing, then, that in an election these thousand ill-informed people can completely swamp a judgement made by the single well-informed person. But that's the way the system works; you can be the most clueless gink imaginable, and your vote is worth just as much as the person who's made the study of that particular issue their life's work.
Vinge is a geek's geek, several times he uses the bandwidth limitation to most excellent and credible use -- and in truth, limitations stemming from not having enough bandwidth will never go away.
I particularly liked the 'postings' from the race that were mostly speculations about the situation and requests for more information, and concluded with the Known Net version of "please reply by email, because I don't read this newsgroup" -- I couldn't help laughing when I read that the first time...
So named because those presenting the method believed that no one but Poles their audience would know how to spell Lukasiewicz
Or, as John Ball commented in his book Algorithms for RPN Calculators, calling it RPN because no one would be able to either spell or pronounce 'zciweisakuL'...
...the 49G+ and 48gII replace the aging Saturn processor (2-4 mhz, I forget what the process was but it probably was 3 microns or so) of older HP's like the 48S/SX/G/G+/GX and 49G with an ARM9 processor (48-75 mhz, probably a.18 micron process).
Learn to use the order-of-magnitude abbreviations correctly, please. The abbreviation 'm' is 'milli-' -- 1/1000. 48 to 75 millihertz is ridiculous. The abbreviation 'M' is 'mega' -- 1,000,000; 48 to 75 megahertz is more rational. Capitalization is important; an error of nine orders of magnitude is embarrassing.
The following equation shall be typed on an algebraic calculator, followed by an RPN calculator. [;] will be the button name for [Enter].
25 ( 46 ) + 254 - 2462 / ( 645 - 2453 )
Algebraic:
25*46+254-2462/(645-2453);
RPN:
25;46*254+2462;645;2453-/-
In the above example, you will realise that the number of keypresses is exactly the same. (In fact, if you cheat and leave out the second bracket on the algebraic calculator, that calculator edges out the RPN by one keystroke!)
Well, let's look at another example:
2462 / sqrt( 645 - 2453 )
Algebraic:
2462/(645-2453) sqrt;
RPN:
2462;645;2453- sqrt/
But wait -- algebraic entry is supposed to let you enter the equation exactly as it's written, but the square root function is after the parentheses close out the subtraction. The distinguishing feature of RPN is that the operation immediately follows the operand(s) -- first number, second number, add; number, square root. But with algebraic-entry calculators, all of the single-operand functions are entered after the value they operate on, instead of being before them, as they're written. So all of the single-operand functions on a so-called 'algebraic-entry' calculator are, in fact, using RPN -- so your calculator is actually a bastard mix of algebraic and RPN, forcing you to switch back and forth between the entry systems as you enter an equation. RPN calculators are consistent in their use.
The problem with Galaxies is that it is NOT a game. It is a 'simulation' of the Star Wars universe, but unfortunately you get to simulate the life of the most bored person in the galaxy...
Now you know why Luke spent all of his free time fantasizing about being somewhere else... anywhere else...
Re:Whats the possibility with security here?
on
Memory Activity LEDs
·
· Score: 1
with only 18 leds for 512 million (give of take a few) I would think that there would be very little information you could pull out of looking at the led pattern (granted I can't RTFA, since its already dead....)
The article isn't dead; you just have to try a few times to get past the slashdotting.
However, the LEDs show how much memory activity is going on in the memory module, rather than any indicator of the data being accessed, the same way that the LED or LCD indicators on an equalizer show you how much signal is in each frequency range of the output from your stereo without telling you which frequencies in each range block are being produced. And with just the indicator, you wouldn't be able to tell whether the program was slamming memory hard because it was doing something that required large memory transfers, or had just been poorly optimized for memory usage and wasn't caching effectively.
Okay, again, same comment here as with Spider's little piece. What facts, what statistics, what anything can these people point to that shows the "decline of Science Fiction" as anything near reality? Some of the best science fiction I have EVER read has come out in the last three years. What the hell are these people smoking?
In another rant of Spider's, he talks about another issue that I believe contributes heavily to the problem -- the compression of the midlist. And it's not just Spider complaining about it -- and it's been going on for some time, with various articles about it, like this one and this one and this one.
Basically, it's a bottom-line business decision by the publishers. Big-name writers and bestsellers make a publisher lots of money; midlist writers, whose works sell steadily but not spectacularly, don't. So the publishers, driving their book publishing by the almighty bottom line, have their computers watching the sales of each author; if their sales slip, their next book's print run will be smaller, so they don't run the risk of having unsold copies returned or pile up in their warehouse, and the next advance they offer will be smaller. And because the print run is smaller, they won't run as much advertising, and the book won't get as wide a distribution, so that book won't sell as well as the last one -- repeating the cycle. The death of the midlist isn't something that affects just SF, though; it cuts across the entire publishing world, fiction and nonfiction alike. With the eternal drive for profitability, publishers can no longer afford to take chances on anything that doesn't have guaranteed profits. And so you look at the book racks at a gift shop in an airport, and you see entire rows of the latest Tom Clancy or Michael Crichton or whatever the latest blockbuster is, and under them you see the syndicate-written romance novels and movie novelizations and whatnot, one title per rack.
Does Tom Clancy write books that sell well because he's a fantastic writer, or because his books take up a third of the display space on the book racks and are hyped from here to eternity? And do the midlist writers write books that sell poorly because they're bad writers, or because their latest book is only visible in one tiny rack on the wall, and the announcement of its publication only appears in special-interest magazines?
All it takes is a barely-perceptible downtick in a midlist author's sales, and the publishers' computers mark him for the descending spiral of lowered advances and lower print runs, eventually downsizing him off their lists unless they can produce a work that beats the curse of diminished print runs and advertising. But while book sales of 1,000 copies is devastation to a large publisher, it's very good for a small publisher -- and midlist writers have been moving to small publishers in droves, resulting in the small publishers becoming so overloaded that it's hard to break in.
It's not just any putative decline in the quality of writing -- there has always been and always will be more than enough tripe to fill slushpiles -- but science fiction has, for the most part, been a midlist genre, and the business of publishing is squeezing out of existence the area where many well-known SF authors spent their careers.
Slashdot Mirror
The original posting was talking about space fighters. The point-defense systems on the Galactica did appear to be either mass drivers or some kind of mini-missile system (from the 'tracers'), though. It didn't seem to me that the Vipers had a projectile-based main weapons system, because we a) never saw any scenes of them arming a Viper's main weapons, and b) with the Galactica being slated for decommissioning, and the Viper Mk.IIs being museum exhibits, you wouldn't expect that they'd keep any ammunition around -- they'd have had to go to Ragnar to arm both the Galactica and the Vipers. But from what we saw, they just had to get the systems functional on the Vipers, without needing ammo loadouts; that implies that the Viper's main weapons are energy-based, driven off the fighters' engine systems.
In that regard, the 'Wing Commander' games and movie were better, in that the mass driver cannon were one of the most effective weapons if you could hit with them -- but they sucked energy to run. However, in Battlestar Galactica, it appeared that for small-craft weapons you pretty much had a choice between missiles and some kind of plasma-in-a-magnetic-bottle weapon. For missiles, a kinetic-kill system is kind of pointless -- even air-to-air missiles today don't rely on the missile itself actually hitting its target -- so a high-explosive or small nuke warhead is what you'd expect to see.
I expect that we're never going to get told why neither side uses kinetic-kill systems for the fighters' primary weapons, although I would guess that an energy weapon will have a point at which the 'projectile' dissipates; a kinetic-kill weapon in space would keep going, producing widely-ranging hazard zones from old battles.
One idea that could be a step toward a fix for this problem -- and it's not just with chemistry patents -- is to require that a company holding a patent actually be using that patent in a product. It's not an ironclad solution, nor does it solve all of the problems with patents, but it does eliminate the 'patent it just in case we can get someone to pay to license it some time in the future' attitude, as well as eliminating companies that exist only as licensing houses for a stable of patents, producing nothing themselves.
Aargh. Screwed up the hyperlink. The Nemesis article is here.
-- Robert A. Heinlein
Making something difficult is no substitute for making it impossible.
The point I was making is that you can't make predictions that involve a fundamental paradigm shift from your knowlege. Heinlein knew about digital computers, and he could see that digital computers were better for crunching numerical data (you try dialing in 37d14m32s on an analog input device reliably). But he didn't have the knowledge to see where solid-state circuitry could be taken, so while he did make evolutionary predictions about other technologies, he believed digital computers would remain large, special-purpose, and difficult to get information in and out of, based on the limitations of the technology he was familiar with. Other writers, lacking any familiarity with computers, were able to ignore the limits that projecting current technology would have imposed, and made wilder projections that, in fact, more closely matched the actual advance of technology.
Predictions about the advance of a technology only work well as long as that advance occurs along an evolutionary path; as soon as it involves a revolutionary jump, 'predictions' become no more than WAGs (Wild-Ass Guesses).
If you look at the patterns of technological predictions that have failed, they tend to cluster into several groups, such as:
1) Lack of advances with energy storage. For all the technological advances elsewhere, a tank full of gasoline or jet fuel is still one of the densest energy storage media known.
2) Lack of advances with energy production. Going along with the previous limitation, many of the glowing predictions for the future involved each individual's having access to -- either directly or indirectly for manufacturing purposes -- many times more energy than they do now, for much less money. Nuclear power was supposed to be the genie of infinite energy -- but that hope died with Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. How many people remember the NS Savannah?
3) Cultural shifts. Look at the images of the Family of Tomorrow, living in the City of Tomorrow. Aside from clothing, they were identical to the popular image of the ideal family, living in the idealized Suburbia. You got in your aircar and flew to work, your wife zapped dinner from frozen to steaming in seconds, their home would be made entirely of synthetic materials -- but society still had all the same values. Ignoring for the moment that this was the white, middle-class future (turning a blind eye to the race-based inequities of current society), the society that made these predictions was, on the whole, considerably more responsible than today's society. The predictions expected that, with the advances in technology, mankind would become rational, well-educated, and responsible, able to face the challenge of a sky filled with aircars and devise a solution that everyone would agree on. Now contrast this with the people you see around you on the roads, and imagine what things would be like if they had three dimensions to be stupid with.
4) Modern business management. How long do you keep throwing money into a project before you expect to get a return? For many years, this was the single biggest advantage Japanese business had over American business -- they were willing to engage in R&D programs that wouldn't even begin to pay off for a decade or more, while in the US, an R&D program that wouldn't pay for itself in two years already had two-and-a-half strikes against it with management. Business practices have improved, but research programs that don't have a hope in hell of paying off in less than twenty years, or which, despite producing results quickly, will be hugely expensive without producing anything marketable, fall by the wayside in the eternal chase for the almighty Bottom Line. And even governments, with the ever-increasing amount of panis et circenses, err, entitlement programs, are finding it harder and harder to commit the money that such research requires, particularly when failure -- or repeated failure that is inevitable in research -- constitutes grounds for yanking your funding.
5) Paradigm shifts. People make predictions by extending what they already know; they can't predict changes that alter the underlying premises upon which those predictions are made. Technological advances can go off into directions that render a prediction useless. For example, Robert Heinlein, one of the world's most renowned science-fiction writers, described fusion-driven starships -- torchships -- that were navigated by teams of astrogators taking star sights by hand, manually converting the sight data into binary using large reference books, entering this binary data into a huge computer (again, manually) that crunched the sight data, returned a solution that had to be (manually) converted back from binary, and then applied to the engines. That was Heinlein's experience with computers; that was how he predicted their future. The invention of integrated circuits and the microcomputer rendered that prediction ludicrously anachronistic, as if you went into an FAA control tower and found the air-traffic controllers guiding planes by pushing little model planes around on a map, a la RAF Fighter Command in WWII.
I have no idea where I read this originally, but I remember a line I read several decades ago -- a quote from a blimp pilot that exemplifies that concept:
The point is that the fire began with the ignition of the doped skin of the Hindenberg, not with the ignition of the hydrogen in the lift cells. If you watch the film, you'll notice that the Hindenberg remains floating until a large part of the stern is aflame, at which point the stern begins to drop -- a situation consonant with the conflagration spreading along the skin until the heat and flames rupture the lift cells, at which point the hydrogen would rise, burning at the hydrogen/air interface without ever achieving the requisite mixture required for it to explode. The blue flames from the burning hydrogen are drowned out by the orange flames of the burning skin of the airship, which is why you can't see them on the film.
The hydrogen contributed to the crash; the rupture of the lift cells deprived the Hindenberg of the lift it needed to remain aloft, and the heat from the burning hydrogen no doubt contributed to the weakening of the airframe. Given the structural and weight limitations of a lighter-than-air vessel, even had the lift gas been helium, once the fire had begun to rupture the lift cells, the vessel was doomed; impact with the ground due to loss of lift would crush the dirigible's frame. However, it is likely that the aluminum paint the skin of the airship was doped with was the proximate cause of the disaster; had it been skinned with a material that was not pyrotechnic, the discharge that ignited the skin of the Hindenberg would merely have burned a rip in the skin, rather than lighting a fuse that would burn through the whole vessel.
What 'social issues that THC brings about'? Or have you bought into the propaganda campaign that goes back to 1895, when William Randolph Hearst started a 30-year propaganda campaign denouncing Spaniards, Mexican-Americans and Latinos, portraying Mexicans as lazy pot-smoking layabouts after the marijuana-smoking army of Pancho Villa seized 800,000 acres of prime Mexican timberland Hearst owned, which he harvested to make pulp paper to print his newspapers? Go look at the history of marijuana criminalization; you'll find it filled with unsubstantiated claims, gross exaggerations, and outright lies.
Before the Civil War, hemp was widely grown, but the process of separating the pulp from the fiber was hugely labor-intensive, only cost-effective using slaves, so after slavery was abolished, even though an acre of hemp produced four times the paper pulp that an acre of timberland would, it was much less expensive to log the timber than to process the hemp. The invention of the Schlichten decorticator changed that; a simple mechanical device allowed fast and easy separation of pulp from fiber. DuPont, Hearst, and their associates lobbied and conspired to crush the competition posed by hemp, and they succeeded. For example, from 1935 to 1937, I.I. DuPont personally lobbied the chief counsel of the Treasury Department, Herman Oliphant, and repeatedly assured him that DuPont's synthetic petrochemicals (i.e., urethane), could replace hempseed oil in the marketplace. Some large pharmaceutical companies also stood to gain by the criminalization of cannabis, since their patented prescription tranquilizers (barbituates, etc) would replace cannabis to some extent.
Public perception of hemp after 1915 was strongly influenced by numerous newspaper and magazine articles that ascribed every evil to the ifluence of marijuana, just as opium and cocaine had been demonized and vilified years before. Other racists with pretensions to "Keep America American" were happy to ride the bandwagon driven by Hearst's yellow journalism. The attitude of C. M. Goethe, a prominent member of the American Coalition, was typical:
Over the years, marijuana got blamed for crime and violence among Mexicans and blacks in states along the border with Mexico. Hearst used his chain of newspapers to continuously publish hate-mongering racist articles that fueled America's xenophobia with terrifying headlines such as: "Marihuana Makes Fiends of Boys in 30 Days: Hashish Goads Users to Blood-Lust!", "New Dope Lure, Marihuana, Has Many Victims", "Hotel Clerk Identifies Marihuana Smoker as 'Wild Gunman' Arrested for Shootings". A spate of articles that appeared in popular magazines featured titles such as "Marihuana -- Assassin of Youth" (American Magazine), "Sex Crazing Drug Menace" (Physical Culture), and "Youth Gone Loco" (Christian Century). Amongst the dreadful effects attributed to "The Menace of Marihuana" in the International Medical Digest, there was a particularly tragic case: "A boy and a girl who had lost their sense so completely after smoking marihuana eloped and were married."
During the committee hearings connec
Given that nVidia has tweaked its drivers specifically to make the drivers aware of when the computer was running 3DMark 2003, in order to use specially-optimized code specific to the 3DMark tests to boost its cards' benchmark scores, I'm not surprised that nVidia decided to bankroll development of software to show off its cards... certainly the benchmarks don't show them in a particularly good light...
Unfortunately, it's not likely that anyone rich enough to be able to afford to buy one is going to have the kind of romance in their soul that would be necessary for them to tell US Subs to do the interior in brass, walnut, and rich fabrics to create a modern-day Nautilus (Captain Nemo's, not the US Navy's, for those of you who were never exposed to 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea).
I think that George O. Smith's Venus Equilateral story "Pandora's Millions" predated Damon Knight's story; The Complete Venus Equilateral dates from about 1945. In it, the invention of the duplicator causes a societal collapse, as the first people to get duplicators make copies of their money, gold, and jewels, and later as anyone with a household replicator and a set of pattern discs is functionally independent for the basic necessities (duplicate yourself a fresh set of batteries when the old ones get low).
However, a society based on service value (you can't duplicate medical care, and a personal replicator can't build you a home) keeps things from falling into total chaos until the VE researchers come up with materials that cannot be scanned by the duplicator. These materials are used for money, and for packaging 'Certified Originals' -- objects that have never been scanned for duplication.
The VE stories also raise another societal issue that replicators would cause that many other stories, including Star Trek, never addressed. The VE duplicator can duplicate living material; it becomes the accepted medical practice, when faced with an extremely complicated or risky case where even the slightest mistake in treatment would kill the patient, to create as many duplicates of the patient as necessary, performing the treatment or surgery over and over again, until the physicians are able to treat the condition successfully, after which the real patient is treated the same way. This does, of course, leave the physicians in the position of having to dispose of the cured duplicate.
The ability to create duplicates of living things also establishes 'duplicate' as an epithet when used to another person, which creates a social stigma against twins.
It is perhaps amusing, then, that in an election these thousand ill-informed people can completely swamp a judgement made by the single well-informed person. But that's the way the system works; you can be the most clueless gink imaginable, and your vote is worth just as much as the person who's made the study of that particular issue their life's work.
I particularly liked the 'postings' from the race that were mostly speculations about the situation and requests for more information, and concluded with the Known Net version of "please reply by email, because I don't read this newsgroup" -- I couldn't help laughing when I read that the first time...
Or, as John Ball commented in his book Algorithms for RPN Calculators, calling it RPN because no one would be able to either spell or pronounce 'zciweisakuL'...
Learn to use the order-of-magnitude abbreviations correctly, please. The abbreviation 'm' is 'milli-' -- 1/1000. 48 to 75 millihertz is ridiculous. The abbreviation 'M' is 'mega' -- 1,000,000; 48 to 75 megahertz is more rational. Capitalization is important; an error of nine orders of magnitude is embarrassing.
Well, let's look at another example:
2462 / sqrt( 645 - 2453 )
Algebraic:
2462/(645-2453) sqrt;
RPN:
2462;645;2453- sqrt
But wait -- algebraic entry is supposed to let you enter the equation exactly as it's written, but the square root function is after the parentheses close out the subtraction. The distinguishing feature of RPN is that the operation immediately follows the operand(s) -- first number, second number, add; number, square root. But with algebraic-entry calculators, all of the single-operand functions are entered after the value they operate on, instead of being before them, as they're written. So all of the single-operand functions on a so-called 'algebraic-entry' calculator are, in fact, using RPN -- so your calculator is actually a bastard mix of algebraic and RPN, forcing you to switch back and forth between the entry systems as you enter an equation. RPN calculators are consistent in their use.
Now you know why Luke spent all of his free time fantasizing about being somewhere else... anywhere else...
The article isn't dead; you just have to try a few times to get past the slashdotting.
However, the LEDs show how much memory activity is going on in the memory module, rather than any indicator of the data being accessed, the same way that the LED or LCD indicators on an equalizer show you how much signal is in each frequency range of the output from your stereo without telling you which frequencies in each range block are being produced. And with just the indicator, you wouldn't be able to tell whether the program was slamming memory hard because it was doing something that required large memory transfers, or had just been poorly optimized for memory usage and wasn't caching effectively.
In another rant of Spider's, he talks about another issue that I believe contributes heavily to the problem -- the compression of the midlist. And it's not just Spider complaining about it -- and it's been going on for some time, with various articles about it, like this one and this one and this one.
Basically, it's a bottom-line business decision by the publishers. Big-name writers and bestsellers make a publisher lots of money; midlist writers, whose works sell steadily but not spectacularly, don't. So the publishers, driving their book publishing by the almighty bottom line, have their computers watching the sales of each author; if their sales slip, their next book's print run will be smaller, so they don't run the risk of having unsold copies returned or pile up in their warehouse, and the next advance they offer will be smaller. And because the print run is smaller, they won't run as much advertising, and the book won't get as wide a distribution, so that book won't sell as well as the last one -- repeating the cycle. The death of the midlist isn't something that affects just SF, though; it cuts across the entire publishing world, fiction and nonfiction alike. With the eternal drive for profitability, publishers can no longer afford to take chances on anything that doesn't have guaranteed profits. And so you look at the book racks at a gift shop in an airport, and you see entire rows of the latest Tom Clancy or Michael Crichton or whatever the latest blockbuster is, and under them you see the syndicate-written romance novels and movie novelizations and whatnot, one title per rack.
Does Tom Clancy write books that sell well because he's a fantastic writer, or because his books take up a third of the display space on the book racks and are hyped from here to eternity? And do the midlist writers write books that sell poorly because they're bad writers, or because their latest book is only visible in one tiny rack on the wall, and the announcement of its publication only appears in special-interest magazines?
All it takes is a barely-perceptible downtick in a midlist author's sales, and the publishers' computers mark him for the descending spiral of lowered advances and lower print runs, eventually downsizing him off their lists unless they can produce a work that beats the curse of diminished print runs and advertising. But while book sales of 1,000 copies is devastation to a large publisher, it's very good for a small publisher -- and midlist writers have been moving to small publishers in droves, resulting in the small publishers becoming so overloaded that it's hard to break in.
It's not just any putative decline in the quality of writing -- there has always been and always will be more than enough tripe to fill slushpiles -- but science fiction has, for the most part, been a midlist genre, and the business of publishing is squeezing out of existence the area where many well-known SF authors spent their careers.