Fair enough. There are possible arguments shifting the blame away from LG. Consumers using the things directly against space heaters seems a bit thin, but the power supply issue is a possibility. Oh well. We may know after all the legal wrangling is done.
Well, in 1954, there were all the navigational methods of the past plus RDF (radio direction finder) systems, that allowed you to triangulate your position based on fixed beacons. Such systems existed in 1920, but weren't really in wide deployment, although some skilled navigators/radio operators probably were using those techniques with commercial radio broadcasts to navigate. Otherwise there were compasses, navigating by stars (using clocks and other instruments like sextants), charts, dead reckoning, following road signs and maps on land, etc. In 1850 there were compasses, maps, stopping to ask for directions, road signs, mile markers, etc. In 1776, the sextant had been invented, so not much was different from 1850 except for accuracy. In 300 BC, there were maps, although obviously not as good as later maps, mile markers and road signs, etc., though not as widespread as later. Navigating by landmarks and asking directions, etc. It's possible that some people may have had magnetic compasses, although there's no historical documentation of magnetic compasses for another hundred years or so. There were still plenty of methods of navigating by the moon and stars and various instruments for tracking celestial objects.
Today, all of the old methods are still valid and should not be forgotten. GPS is taken as a given but could vanish at any moment from a big solar flare or for political reasons. Still, it's better and faster and more accurate and precise than any other method available now. Having it be more accurate and precise is not a bad thing and it helps prevent confusion in navigation devices.
I was speaking more to the general question of "technology X is only good for military applications, so why should civilians be allowed to use it?" It's silly. A useful technology is a useful technology. More accuracy and precision in any measuring device is good and useful. Immerman might as well have been arguing "Realistically what applications are there for [more than 640k of memory] outside of [military or other government sanctioned work]?"
Hmmm. This book is by John Gribbin. Considering that he predicted that the alignment of the planets would trigger massive earthquakes worldwide and sink LA into the ocean back in the early 1980's, I'm going to take it with a grain of salt. His writing doesn't seem to be based on a lot of evidence.
Example:
Example: Earth's molten iron core is what gives us a strong magnetic field that protects our atmosphere. The only way they could get that to work out was to put a supernova(!!!).1 light years (that's not a typo) from the solar system at a critical time while it was forming.
What critical time are we talking about here? I'm guessing it's going to be a window of hundreds of millions of years if not billions of years before the actual formation of the sun. Considering that stars aren't actually in fixed positions relative to each other. I'd say that affects the odds quite a bit.
Not to mention the fact that, even without as much radioactive material, any planet will still have a molten core for a very long time. The radioactive heating extends it significantly, but life arose on Earth within a billion years of its formation. The core still would have been molten then even if it were 100% dead from a radioactivity standpoint. It's pretty likely that a planet of similar size and age to Earth but with no radioactive elements might still have a molten core. It could also be twice or three times as massive and therefore keep its heat of formation even longer. Not to mention that there are all kinds of possible arrangements that don't rely on radioactive elements to keep a core hot. Such as binary planet systems converting their massive rotational energy into heat through tidal forces over time.
Our big moon is also useful to us, but lots of planets have moons. I haven't seen any hard and fast rule on how big a moon you need to have or even if you really need to have one and, even if you need one, the odds against having one don't seem to be astronomical.
I'm not saying we don't have a nice planet. We do. It's a very nice planet (arguing from an anthropocentric viewpoint, anyway), but that doesn't mean that it's the only nice planet by a long shot. It also doesn't mean that a less nice planet can't also support life, which may even develop into intelligent life.
While William of Ockham lived at a time when spelling was not exactly standardised, it would seem that Ockham is correct, and not Occam, no matter how many times it's been spelled that way. He is almost certainly named for the village of Ockham (name recorded as "Bocheham" nearly a thousand years ago). The "ham" at the end is from old French/German/English for "home" or "village". See, for example, the word "hamlet". So, since he's named after a village called Ockham, and the village, quite correctly, has "ham" at the end, it should be Ockham's Razor. Aside from needing to have "ham" at the end, there are some good pronunciation/spelling reasons for why it shouldn't be Okham or Occham.
France for got access even though their claim to the spoils of war were dubious at best
I suppose they really were spoils of war in all but name. In any case, anything given to France would have been reparations, for which their claims were far from dubious.
And it turned out that not even the rocket scientists impact on allied technology was that great.
Well, you know, Apollo program. Landing humans on the moon and all that. Not to mention ICBMS.
You're right about how easy it is to find amoral people without needing to borrow them from dictatorial governments.
I'm curious what installation steps would prevent screen burn-in from happening? Only installing in devices that automatically blank for one second of every five, maybe? Also, what would the consumer be doing that's stupid? Not running a screen saver once or twice a minute?
In this day and age, consumers expect screen burn in to no longer be an issue. Once upon a time it was the consumers issue to deal with because the CRT technology was still fairly primitive, but the problem was largely solved over time, so the problem re-emerging is seen as a step back. Modern operating system interfaces are full of fixed-position graphical elements. Screens that suffer burn-in easily are unfit for the purpose of the modern GUI.
Do they determine what constitutes "ties to Iran's government"? Does it mean Iranian diplomats, Iranian government ministers, vacationing bureaucrats from some government agency, vacationing postal workers, vacationing relatives of postal workers, students in the country on government loans, or just anyone Iranian since anyone from Iran has a "tie" to the Iranian government by virtue of being a citizen?
I mean, seriously, this is stupid. If someone wants to get clandestine pictures of things in plain view of the public, they will get them. There is no way to stop it from happening. Interviewing people conspicuously taking pictures in public places is absolutely useless.
Good or bad, decide for yourself, but it's good to be clear on what is actually going on.
Authorities are helpfully informing anyone who might be a foreign spy that they're being watched so that they can know, through process of elimination, which agents are _not_ being watched? Xenophobic people in positions of authority, trying to play hero, are participating in meaningless harassment that won't make a dent in any real intelligence-gathering operation?
I remember I lost the manual for _Kings Quest IV_ back in the day. Had to keep loading and reloading the game until it asked the question about a word starting with "b" on the verb list, for which I knew the answer was "bridle". I also had a hand drawn copy of the Sim City code sheet as a backup.
Well, no, not really. The greenhouse effect from CO2 is well understood and proven. The kinds of processes in nature that would mitigate the greenhouse effect are the ones with the lengthy and complicated chains. In other words, we know that more CO2 means more trapped heat, so the processes that would prevent increased CO2 from producing global warning are the complicated bit.
That's interesting actually. Heat actually does have mass, and therefore results in gravity. There's also a tiny amount of expansion, which someone mentioned. It also would affect the flow of the tides, which would affect the position and speed of the moon, etc. The effects would be minute, of course, but could they be enough to alter the course of an asteroid? The answer is obviously "yes", but probably only in a very minute "butterfly effect" way which isn't really measurable. The answer to the reporters specific question is still a "no", of course. Ask the same question about a near-miss asteroid a million years from now, however, and the answer would kind of be "yes", although it would also be "yes" for the question "is this the result of a butterfly flapping its wings a million years ago".
That video was also really interesting to watch. I especially was interested by the part where the reporter tells Bill Nye not to worry the viewers and he says that they don't need to worry about this one, but they do need to worry about the next one. On the same day as the passage of the asteroid they were discussing, a half-megaton explosion which would have destroyed a Russian city if it had penetrated a little further into the atmosphere, occurred as a result of another asteroid. That's pretty interesting.
Since it seems that this article is going to get more scrutiny from the current Slashdot overlords than the typical article, this seems like as good a place as any to make feature requests. So, as long as we're making requests to bring back old stuff (although the feature you're asking for isn't actually that old), how about a search feature that works? Aside from a way to search old articles (an actual advanced search rather than the pathetic excuse we have now), it would be nice to be able to search your own comments, or even just navigate them in a sane way. I've been posting here for a long, long time, so having to navigate my old comments by hitting "next" a few thousand times is really, really lame. It's a pity that all of my oldest comments were AC since I didn't bother to get an account for a long time, so I'll never be able to search them. On the other hand, as it stands right now, unless Slashdot is willing to hand out dumps of its database, I can't search them now anyway.
That made me think a bit. This page takes up about 1.7 megabytes, but that's including all the markup and images and so forth. The actual comments don't take up more than about 140 kilobytes. Going by yesterdays total, I'll estimate 30 articles per day, and around 6000 days for the existence of Slashdot. That would be about 25 gigabytes. Of course, it's text, so 10 to 1 non-lossy compression would probably be quite possible. That means that you should be able to fit the entirety of Slashdot on one DVD.
Hmmm. Replying to my own post here. I have to admit, on re-reading, it's too ambiguous for me to say that. I'm going to have to say that I'm flat out wrong on the post I'm replying to. For the "reduce tenfold" matter, however, you're definitely wrong. The "fold" part of "tenfold" implies repetition ten times, which, in this context, means division.
Reduce ten-fold means "divide by ten". Remember that division is actually repeated subtraction. If you have 13 of something, what do you have to subtract from it 10 times to get 0? The answer is 1.3. That's also, not by coincidence, the answer to "what do you get when you divide 13 by 10?" and "what do you get when you have 13 and reduce it tenfold?"
Depends on what isotope really. If it were Plutonium 238, there wouldn't be much to be afraid of. It would produce 122 kilowatts of heat, so storage would be an issue. You'd want to store it in lots of separate containers in a large, cooled space, or even outdoors. You would also need radiation shielding, but only a tiny amount of it. It's also toxic if consumed, but so are lots of things.
Well, the officers in _The Hunt for Red October_ had a good reason to steal billions of dollars worth of equipment from their own government:
Capt. Vasili Borodin: I will live in Montana. And I will marry a round American woman and raise rabbits, and she will cook them for me. And I will have a pickup truck... maybe even a "recreational vehicle." And drive from state to state. Do they let you do that? Captain Ramius: I suppose. Capt. Vasili Borodin: No papers? Captain Ramius: No papers, state to state.
I suppose they were talking about driving, not flying. They didn't mention doing it within 100 miles of a border either.
Slashdot Mirror
"In three months it will be spring. You _don't_ need heat in spring!!!"
Fair enough. There are possible arguments shifting the blame away from LG. Consumers using the things directly against space heaters seems a bit thin, but the power supply issue is a possibility. Oh well. We may know after all the legal wrangling is done.
Well, in 1954, there were all the navigational methods of the past plus RDF (radio direction finder) systems, that allowed you to triangulate your position based on fixed beacons. Such systems existed in 1920, but weren't really in wide deployment, although some skilled navigators/radio operators probably were using those techniques with commercial radio broadcasts to navigate. Otherwise there were compasses, navigating by stars (using clocks and other instruments like sextants), charts, dead reckoning, following road signs and maps on land, etc. In 1850 there were compasses, maps, stopping to ask for directions, road signs, mile markers, etc. In 1776, the sextant had been invented, so not much was different from 1850 except for accuracy. In 300 BC, there were maps, although obviously not as good as later maps, mile markers and road signs, etc., though not as widespread as later. Navigating by landmarks and asking directions, etc. It's possible that some people may have had magnetic compasses, although there's no historical documentation of magnetic compasses for another hundred years or so. There were still plenty of methods of navigating by the moon and stars and various instruments for tracking celestial objects.
Today, all of the old methods are still valid and should not be forgotten. GPS is taken as a given but could vanish at any moment from a big solar flare or for political reasons. Still, it's better and faster and more accurate and precise than any other method available now. Having it be more accurate and precise is not a bad thing and it helps prevent confusion in navigation devices.
I was speaking more to the general question of "technology X is only good for military applications, so why should civilians be allowed to use it?" It's silly. A useful technology is a useful technology. More accuracy and precision in any measuring device is good and useful. Immerman might as well have been arguing "Realistically what applications are there for [more than 640k of memory] outside of [military or other government sanctioned work]?"
Hmmm. This book is by John Gribbin. Considering that he predicted that the alignment of the planets would trigger massive earthquakes worldwide and sink LA into the ocean back in the early 1980's, I'm going to take it with a grain of salt. His writing doesn't seem to be based on a lot of evidence.
Example:
Example: Earth's molten iron core is what gives us a strong magnetic field that protects our atmosphere. The only way they could get that to work out was to put a supernova(!!!) .1 light years (that's not a typo) from the solar system at a critical time while it was forming.
What critical time are we talking about here? I'm guessing it's going to be a window of hundreds of millions of years if not billions of years before the actual formation of the sun. Considering that stars aren't actually in fixed positions relative to each other. I'd say that affects the odds quite a bit.
Not to mention the fact that, even without as much radioactive material, any planet will still have a molten core for a very long time. The radioactive heating extends it significantly, but life arose on Earth within a billion years of its formation. The core still would have been molten then even if it were 100% dead from a radioactivity standpoint. It's pretty likely that a planet of similar size and age to Earth but with no radioactive elements might still have a molten core. It could also be twice or three times as massive and therefore keep its heat of formation even longer. Not to mention that there are all kinds of possible arrangements that don't rely on radioactive elements to keep a core hot. Such as binary planet systems converting their massive rotational energy into heat through tidal forces over time.
Our big moon is also useful to us, but lots of planets have moons. I haven't seen any hard and fast rule on how big a moon you need to have or even if you really need to have one and, even if you need one, the odds against having one don't seem to be astronomical.
I'm not saying we don't have a nice planet. We do. It's a very nice planet (arguing from an anthropocentric viewpoint, anyway), but that doesn't mean that it's the only nice planet by a long shot. It also doesn't mean that a less nice planet can't also support life, which may even develop into intelligent life.
While William of Ockham lived at a time when spelling was not exactly standardised, it would seem that Ockham is correct, and not Occam, no matter how many times it's been spelled that way. He is almost certainly named for the village of Ockham (name recorded as "Bocheham" nearly a thousand years ago). The "ham" at the end is from old French/German/English for "home" or "village". See, for example, the word "hamlet". So, since he's named after a village called Ockham, and the village, quite correctly, has "ham" at the end, it should be Ockham's Razor. Aside from needing to have "ham" at the end, there are some good pronunciation/spelling reasons for why it shouldn't be Okham or Occham.
France for got access even though their claim to the spoils of war were dubious at best
I suppose they really were spoils of war in all but name. In any case, anything given to France would have been reparations, for which their claims were far from dubious.
And it turned out that not even the rocket scientists impact on allied technology was that great.
Well, you know, Apollo program. Landing humans on the moon and all that. Not to mention ICBMS.
You're right about how easy it is to find amoral people without needing to borrow them from dictatorial governments.
I'm curious what installation steps would prevent screen burn-in from happening? Only installing in devices that automatically blank for one second of every five, maybe? Also, what would the consumer be doing that's stupid? Not running a screen saver once or twice a minute?
In this day and age, consumers expect screen burn in to no longer be an issue. Once upon a time it was the consumers issue to deal with because the CRT technology was still fairly primitive, but the problem was largely solved over time, so the problem re-emerging is seen as a step back. Modern operating system interfaces are full of fixed-position graphical elements. Screens that suffer burn-in easily are unfit for the purpose of the modern GUI.
Do they determine what constitutes "ties to Iran's government"? Does it mean Iranian diplomats, Iranian government ministers, vacationing bureaucrats from some government agency, vacationing postal workers, vacationing relatives of postal workers, students in the country on government loans, or just anyone Iranian since anyone from Iran has a "tie" to the Iranian government by virtue of being a citizen?
I mean, seriously, this is stupid. If someone wants to get clandestine pictures of things in plain view of the public, they will get them. There is no way to stop it from happening. Interviewing people conspicuously taking pictures in public places is absolutely useless.
Good or bad, decide for yourself, but it's good to be clear on what is actually going on.
Authorities are helpfully informing anyone who might be a foreign spy that they're being watched so that they can know, through process of elimination, which agents are _not_ being watched? Xenophobic people in positions of authority, trying to play hero, are participating in meaningless harassment that won't make a dent in any real intelligence-gathering operation?
Realistically what applications are there for a high-precision GPS outside of geological/territorial surveys and military intelligence?
Ooh, ooh, teacher, teacher! I know this one! It's knowing which freaking road you're on when there are several close together.
Seriously, what kind of question is that?
I remember I lost the manual for _Kings Quest IV_ back in the day. Had to keep loading and reloading the game until it asked the question about a word starting with "b" on the verb list, for which I knew the answer was "bridle". I also had a hand drawn copy of the Sim City code sheet as a backup.
That involved following/riding on whales, didn't it?
Well, no, not really. The greenhouse effect from CO2 is well understood and proven. The kinds of processes in nature that would mitigate the greenhouse effect are the ones with the lengthy and complicated chains. In other words, we know that more CO2 means more trapped heat, so the processes that would prevent increased CO2 from producing global warning are the complicated bit.
But are they "enemy combatant(s)" in a war zone, or are they "unlawful combatants"?
That's interesting actually. Heat actually does have mass, and therefore results in gravity. There's also a tiny amount of expansion, which someone mentioned. It also would affect the flow of the tides, which would affect the position and speed of the moon, etc. The effects would be minute, of course, but could they be enough to alter the course of an asteroid? The answer is obviously "yes", but probably only in a very minute "butterfly effect" way which isn't really measurable. The answer to the reporters specific question is still a "no", of course. Ask the same question about a near-miss asteroid a million years from now, however, and the answer would kind of be "yes", although it would also be "yes" for the question "is this the result of a butterfly flapping its wings a million years ago".
That video was also really interesting to watch. I especially was interested by the part where the reporter tells Bill Nye not to worry the viewers and he says that they don't need to worry about this one, but they do need to worry about the next one. On the same day as the passage of the asteroid they were discussing, a half-megaton explosion which would have destroyed a Russian city if it had penetrated a little further into the atmosphere, occurred as a result of another asteroid. That's pretty interesting.
The upside is that we got a lot more done in the winter.
Guys, it would have to get *really* hot, really fast to make a difference.
I''m confused.
"Open the pod bay doors HAL!"
"First, you gotta do the truffle shuffle."
Testing. Testing.
Also, if the social norm is to jump off a bridge, you should too.
Since it seems that this article is going to get more scrutiny from the current Slashdot overlords than the typical article, this seems like as good a place as any to make feature requests. So, as long as we're making requests to bring back old stuff (although the feature you're asking for isn't actually that old), how about a search feature that works? Aside from a way to search old articles (an actual advanced search rather than the pathetic excuse we have now), it would be nice to be able to search your own comments, or even just navigate them in a sane way. I've been posting here for a long, long time, so having to navigate my old comments by hitting "next" a few thousand times is really, really lame. It's a pity that all of my oldest comments were AC since I didn't bother to get an account for a long time, so I'll never be able to search them. On the other hand, as it stands right now, unless Slashdot is willing to hand out dumps of its database, I can't search them now anyway.
That made me think a bit. This page takes up about 1.7 megabytes, but that's including all the markup and images and so forth. The actual comments don't take up more than about 140 kilobytes. Going by yesterdays total, I'll estimate 30 articles per day, and around 6000 days for the existence of Slashdot. That would be about 25 gigabytes. Of course, it's text, so 10 to 1 non-lossy compression would probably be quite possible. That means that you should be able to fit the entirety of Slashdot on one DVD.
Hmmm. Replying to my own post here. I have to admit, on re-reading, it's too ambiguous for me to say that. I'm going to have to say that I'm flat out wrong on the post I'm replying to. For the "reduce tenfold" matter, however, you're definitely wrong. The "fold" part of "tenfold" implies repetition ten times, which, in this context, means division.
To "reduce it by 10p" is not the same thing as "reduce it 10p". One is a way of describing subtraction and the other is a way of describing division.
Reduce ten-fold means "divide by ten". Remember that division is actually repeated subtraction. If you have 13 of something, what do you have to subtract from it 10 times to get 0? The answer is 1.3. That's also, not by coincidence, the answer to "what do you get when you divide 13 by 10?" and "what do you get when you have 13 and reduce it tenfold?"
Depends on what isotope really. If it were Plutonium 238, there wouldn't be much to be afraid of. It would produce 122 kilowatts of heat, so storage would be an issue. You'd want to store it in lots of separate containers in a large, cooled space, or even outdoors. You would also need radiation shielding, but only a tiny amount of it. It's also toxic if consumed, but so are lots of things.
So, not necessarily all that scary.
Well, the officers in _The Hunt for Red October_ had a good reason to steal billions of dollars worth of equipment from their own government:
Capt. Vasili Borodin: I will live in Montana. And I will marry a round American woman and raise rabbits, and she will cook them for me. And I will have a pickup truck... maybe even a "recreational vehicle." And drive from state to state. Do they let you do that?
Captain Ramius: I suppose.
Capt. Vasili Borodin: No papers?
Captain Ramius: No papers, state to state.
I suppose they were talking about driving, not flying. They didn't mention doing it within 100 miles of a border either.