The problem is, PNGs don't support animation. MNG does, and is a lot more flexible than animated GIF, but suffers from poor/non-existent support in browsers.
What are you talking about? PNG uses non-lossy compression. There are no compression artifacts. You must be thinking of JPEG (the lossy format that pretty much all digital cameras seem to inexplicably use as their output format).
On occasion, the balloon chase vehicle and pilot need to pay for property damage, because they do land in crop fields from time to time, but this is well-understood by all parties to be the cost of doing business -- hand shakes resolve these issues more than lawsuits.
I've heard, although it may not be true, that the origin of the term "buying the farm" was from the early days of aviation when emergency landings in farmer's fields were common. Aviators were naturally expected to pay for the damages. If they crashed, they would be figuratively causing enough damage to need to "buy the farm". Posthumously, of course.
Lifting weights never killed anyone in this age group (at least I don't think)
Yeah. Lifting heavy metal objects up over your head/throat/chest never killed anyone. Except for, you know, all the people it has killed. There's a reason you're supposed to use a spotter and that they design weight benches that way. It's not an incredibly dangerous activity, but it most certainly has killed people in that age group.
The post you're replying to was an oblique reference to the movie _Real Genius_ where Val Kilmer's character invents a Socrates quote for the sake of comedy.
On the other hand this guy is a fucking tool that knew what he was doing. You can at least admit that can you not?
No, I can't admit that based on the evidence of the article. If I had more information on this artist and the situation I might admit it, or I might not, depending on what the actual facts are. It's possible he really was trying to get the TSA guys to think that the watch was a bomb, but, taking the article at face value, that's not the case. All we know is that he had an unusual watch with some visible (non-functional) electronics. The TSA guys either panicked or just went into authoritarian CYA mode and called out the bomb squad. The bomb squad guys said that he didn't have a bomb, then he was arrested anyway for possession of bomb-making materials. Anyone with a brain knows that the answer to the question: "could someone make a bomb out of that, combined with some explosives" is "yes" for pretty much any "that" you can imagine. So, laws outlawing bomb making materials clearly outlaw everything. In other words, this should have ended when the bomb squad guys said he didn't have a bomb. The TSA guys and the Sheriff's dept. could have said "oops, honest mistake, sorry for the inconvenience" and let him get on with his harmless life. Maybe there were extenuating circumstances that made it seem like he was more of a threat. None of those have been presented to us that I can find, so to assume the existence of such circumstances seems premature.
It's a solved problem in the same way that the Y2K problem was a solved problem since... well, I suppose since before there were computers to have a Y2K problem. Just don't store the date anywhere as a two digit decimal number. The Y2K problem only existed because of sloppy work that people assumed wouldn't still be in service when the millenium rolled around. Same thing for the 2038 problem. It may be the case by then that there's no legacy stuff around to have that problem, but there's no guaranty of that. The problem itself was already solved way back. It's not as if you need to have a 64 bit system to work with a 64 bit value. Future-proofing everything using a time value would have only been a tiny bit of extra work, it's just that most people didn't bother to do it.
Imagine that. A watch with switches. It's a bit harder to find watches with plastic-insulated wires, although there are plenty with uncoated wire or maybe even magnet wire.
If you do not know by now that the GED holding "Security Professionals" of the TSA would freak the fuck out over this then you are too stupid to be free.
But if your freedom subject to the whims of dumb goons, then you're not truly free in the first place.
Yes, if after they inspected it, determined that there was nothing harmful about it, as happened here.
We must have read different articles. In the article I read, they inspected it, determined that there was nothing wrong with it, then charged the guy with possessing materials to make an explosive device and locked him up anyway. Basically it's saving face. Just like in the Boston lite brite scare. The authorities don't want to look like over-reacting idiots, so it becomes even more important to them to charge the person with something. The people behind the Boston lite brite ads were brought up on bomb hoax charges and copped a plea jut to make it go away and the authorities get to pretend that they're not idiots, just the victims of tricksters. The same sort of thing will happen in this case. They have nothing on the guy, but they'll tell him if he pleads guilty to some ominous-sounding charge, he can walk with time served. He'll have to choose between taking the plea or spending the next decade in and out of jail and court dealing with this. If he takes the plea, then it's over quickly, if he doesn't, then he's going to have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars he probably doesn't have, and travel repeatedly to somewhere he doesn't live and he'll risk prison time if the prosecution can charm the jury, although he may also have a chance at a big payoff suing the city, sheriff, TSA, etc. eventually.
The only reason the kilogram isn't the SI unit for mass is because it was impractical at the time to make a physical object that was exactly one gram or to find a scale accurate enough, so they settled on a thousand gram physical object instead. In any case, I'm pretty sure you meant to say that the gram isn't the SI unit for weight. This is true, but is all but meaningless for most measurements taken on Earth, especially if you're getting your measurements with a balance type scale which, even if it's in ounces, is going to give you the same results on Earth or Mars or the Moon, or even in freefall if it's temporarily accelerated in the right direction.
I seriously doubt that Aristotle could have comprehended calculus or designed a Mars rover.
As much as I resent the lingering traces of Aristotle's sophistry (they still teach that "five senses" nonsense in schools), it seems almost unimaginable that, given a modern education from an early age, he would not have been able to understand calculus or design a Mars rover (to the extent that a single person can design a Mars rover, anyway). Anyone with average intelligence or above, no serious learning disabilities, and no aversion to learning can understand Calculus (at least its practical use, it might be a different story once they get to proving the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus and that sort of thing) and the basic principles of engineering required for at least high-level design of a Mars rover (bearing in mind that designing every aspect of such a rover and doing it well is generally considered beyond the abilities of a single person and is typically done in a team environment).
The problem is that it's completely non-violent white collar crime being treated as if it were a murder. There are some white collar crimes that can be considered to be in that ballpark, such as Bernie Madoff's giant Ponzi scheme. Of course, the scheme Madoff ran actually did lead to quite a few deaths. It seems very unlikely that the piracy scheme in this case did much more than cost the entertainment industry a relatively tiny amount of money.
Real cops are nothing like the way they are portrayed on TV or in films.
The cops portrayed in TV and films these days seem to violate the constitution a few times per episode but are still portrayed unquestioningly as the good guys. Since it's fiction, they also have ridiculously high closure rates on their cases. They also have a ridiculously high number of "ticking time bomb" situations where such things are portrayed as necessary and right. I would be fine with it as fiction, as long as people still maintain a realistic view of police in the real world, but too many people don't seem to be able to distinguish reality from fantasy.
Investigating compromising emanations such as from keyboards, mice, screens, etc. most certainly is a hacking technique, just as calling and pretending to be the telephone repairman who needs the numbers printed on the bottom of the router is a hacking technique.
The problem with the theory that is "works just fine" is how you know it works just fine. The justice system in the US works on the principle of giving people a choice between a plea bargain with a relatively small sentence and a jury trial with a significant risk of a much harsher punishment, guilty or innocent. Oh, and that jury trial comes with a price tag high enough to destroy a person's life, guilty or innocent. The logical choice for most individuals, even the innocent, is to take the plea bargain. Given that, it's really hard to figure out whether or not the system actually works. Prosecutors and police tend to skip this dilemma by looking at conviction rates and concluding that things are working perfectly, unless someone is found not guilty.
Finally, (on topic), the estimation of the dinosaur (predator?) standing 40 feet tall is truly awe-inspiring and reminds me to be thankful of whatever changed to make animals smaller.
I thought that too, but it turns out it's not 40 feet tall, but 40 feet long. So, it's more on the same scale as T. Rex rather than towering over it.
Ok. Clearly I have to go through this slowly and step by step. First, we have:
Playing fast-and-loose with the truth wasn't limited to Romney, but his campaign was the only one that got caught out on it.
This should be fairly self-evidently a paradox. At least, either a paradox, or a statement from someone with special knowledge beyond that available to the general public. It's a safe bet to stick with a paradox until the original AC says otherwise.
Then, someone replies to that with:
if nobody else got caught, how do you know anyone else was doing it?
Pointing out the paradox and asking the original AC to address it.
Then, you come in, letting it whoosh over your head and respond:
We know because plenty of people got caught doing it on both sides. If you're not being willfully obtuse, you could have started reading here for some information on Democrat "spin": FactCheck.org [factcheck.org]
Now, here you're clearly missing the point. The AC you're replying to wasn't making any claims about whether or not both sides were doing it, they were addressing the logical paradox in the original post. Telling that that both sides were, in fact, caught out doing it doesn't somehow make the person pointing out the logical paradox wrong. The paradox in the original statement is still there, and the original AC who posted it hasn't responded to say "oops, I was wrong, both sides were caught out on it". You posting to say that the first AC was wrong doesn't somehow make the second AC wrong. The second AC is still right that there's a logical inconsistency in the post from the first AC.
I hope you learn that being intolerably smug in your ignorance doesn't make you better than those around you. When you completely miss the point, try to look back and just admit that you misread the context.
Why you are thinking that? If you have that kind of labor and resources, then there's little reason to do anything for preparation. You already have civilization and they can figure out things on their own. You certainly don't have the "We'll die of starvation, if you don't figure out how to make an assembly line of X".
The goal is clearly going to be to make more than one. Manufacturing on the very large scale may be a longer term goal, but it is the goal. just building one copy to sit on your bench doesn't make much sense. Why do you think that no information is better than having information?
Why are we speaking of microchips? Nobody, be they a Victorian engineer or not, is going to be able to make anything beyond the crudest integrated circuits without a considerable amount of infrastructure that no longer exists.
I'm speaking of microchips because they're a very good example of a technology that, even if you study an extant example and understand it perfectly in every detail, is extremely difficult to figure out how to manufacture if you don't know how to manufacture it. There are a lot of very hard problems that were figured out in order to manufacture it. Solving them all again can certainly be done in time, but even a short text summarizing the principles involved in microchip manufacture would cut decades off that time. The same thing is true of most technologies.
The context you missed is that the post you responded to was a rhetorical question addressing a logical inconsistency in the previous post. Responding that people on both sides were caught doing it doesn't resolve the paradox the original poster presented.
Well, the Balrogs were at least an order of Maiar with an affinity for darkness and fire. How much their appearance was a matter of choice or of base nature is unclear. In any case, Morgoth also had demons who served under the Balrogs as servants. The Balrogs were also referred to as demons themselves.
The big problem with the question of wings is Tolkein's poetic use of language. If he said that a character was flying, you needed context to tell if he meant literally or just that the character was travelling with speed. Given that he described the form of the Balrog in terms of shadow and mystery, it seems pretty hard to make any definitive statement on the subject. It is fun to argue about it with just a few sentences worth of description to go by though:)
But you think they'd have closed that security hole in 50 years time. It's not like they were Microsoft....
They were a telepathic species. It's quite possible that, in their society, there were no private thoughts. Given that, it's quite possible that they didn't even have any computer security to speak of.
And that's naturally what's happening. Optimization when you don't know the circumstances under which the optimization is going to occur, is doomed to failure. My view is a working and secure machine shop plus competent people running that shop is most of the way back to your bootstrapping of civilization.
And I still think those people in the machine shop are going to be able to work better and faster if they actually have plans in hand that are designed with simple working conditions in mind. Even if they need to adapt things to what's available.
You're kidding me. That's a ridiculous level of testing. Just start running cups of coffee and see what breaks down the road.
This is where we seem to be thinking at cross purposes. I'm thinking in terms of creating an assembly line to provide a civilization with espresso machines, and you're thinking in terms of making a one-off to sit on your work bench for when you feel like a cup (obviously neither of us have addressed where the beans are coming from).
Well, it is pretty much true. Sure, there will be push times, such as right after the catastrophe starts or during harvest time, when you need to work all out. But there will also be a lot of downtime where you'll have time to tinker.
But in a situation where you die if you don't meet your deadline, there's no downtime if you don't make it through the push times. Well, technically there's an eternity of it.
Easier than dealing with documentation that just doesn't apply to your situation and doesn't give you enough information to make things work.
I still believe that having some documentation is better than nothing. I don't really see how nothing is better than something.
Neither is that important a consideration. Really, you're exaggerating the difficulty of this sort of thing.
I don't really think I am. The espresso machine was just an example. There are lots of things far more difficult that you would need to deal with. Also, reverse engineering something and learning exactly what it's composed of and how it works doesn't tell you how to build it. Give the most brilliant victorian engineer complete information on the composition and design of a microchip and they still wouldn't be able to build one. Having some instructions should help.
And it would be a lifetime well spent. I really don't see the point of your argument. Documentation, if it survives, is of some use and if it doesn't, then it is useless. We're pretty sure the machines will survive and a successful reengineering project will have gone beyond what documentation can do (such as actually build a working device using what you have at your disposal).
Given the hypothetical situation we're discussing, it would seem to be better spent bootstrapping an industrial base as fast as possible. To that end, nothing beats having a plan beforehand. Maybe we're arguing at cross purposes here. The point of the project in the article is to eventually document an entire end to end toolchain to build a modern industrial civilazation. Clearly, the documentation will be useless if it doesn't survive, but that's pretty much a tautology. Things that don't exist generally aren't much use. As useful as ingenuity and resourcefulness are in any given situation, they're even more useful if you apply them beforehand and actually prepare.
Why would it? An afternoon would do the job.
An afternoon to put a device through hundreds or thousands of heating/cooling pressurization/de-pressurization cycles and analyze all the faults that occur? Sure, why not.
Well, then you'll figure it out, if it's important enough.
Sure, because when you're constantly battling against the clock for survival in a hostile world, you have plenty of time. This is why I never bother to tie my horse. If it wanders off, I'll eventually find it, if it's important enough.
And there remains the question of how useful this knowledge will be? You won't have industrial civilization at your disposal. So a lot of the design considerations are simply irrelevant due to lack of that infrastructure. And it's likely that the documentation won't actually agree with the machine that was built. This is a common problem which reverse engineering neatly bypasses.
The problem of not having an industrial civilization at your disposal would seem to apply to reverse engineering as well. In fact, it would seem to be harder when dealing with reverse engineering of parts designed by engineers who take modern machining methods for granted as opposed to parts purpose-designed to be workable with simpler fabrication techniques. As for documentation agreeing with what's actually built, this is a common problem. Very often part of the real design of an article resides in the institutional memory of the organization that manufactures it. It's extremely common with software especially for the source itself to be the best and most up-to-date documentation. Nevertheless, the goal of this project is to produce rigorous and definitive documentation.
Also, as far as reverse engineering neatly bypassing that problem, it only works if the reverse engineering gives you absolute knowledge of not only the current composition of every part. Even that may not be enough, since it doesn't actually tell you _how_ to make the parts.
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The problem is, PNGs don't support animation. MNG does, and is a lot more flexible than animated GIF, but suffers from poor/non-existent support in browsers.
What are you talking about? PNG uses non-lossy compression. There are no compression artifacts. You must be thinking of JPEG (the lossy format that pretty much all digital cameras seem to inexplicably use as their output format).
On occasion, the balloon chase vehicle and pilot need to pay for property damage, because they do land in crop fields from time to time, but this is well-understood by all parties to be the cost of doing business -- hand shakes resolve these issues more than lawsuits.
I've heard, although it may not be true, that the origin of the term "buying the farm" was from the early days of aviation when emergency landings in farmer's fields were common. Aviators were naturally expected to pay for the damages. If they crashed, they would be figuratively causing enough damage to need to "buy the farm". Posthumously, of course.
Renew! Renew! Renew!
Lifting weights never killed anyone in this age group (at least I don't think)
Yeah. Lifting heavy metal objects up over your head/throat/chest never killed anyone. Except for, you know, all the people it has killed. There's a reason you're supposed to use a spotter and that they design weight benches that way. It's not an incredibly dangerous activity, but it most certainly has killed people in that age group.
The post you're replying to was an oblique reference to the movie _Real Genius_ where Val Kilmer's character invents a Socrates quote for the sake of comedy.
On the other hand this guy is a fucking tool that knew what he was doing.
You can at least admit that can you not?
No, I can't admit that based on the evidence of the article. If I had more information on this artist and the situation I might admit it, or I might not, depending on what the actual facts are. It's possible he really was trying to get the TSA guys to think that the watch was a bomb, but, taking the article at face value, that's not the case. All we know is that he had an unusual watch with some visible (non-functional) electronics. The TSA guys either panicked or just went into authoritarian CYA mode and called out the bomb squad. The bomb squad guys said that he didn't have a bomb, then he was arrested anyway for possession of bomb-making materials. Anyone with a brain knows that the answer to the question: "could someone make a bomb out of that, combined with some explosives" is "yes" for pretty much any "that" you can imagine. So, laws outlawing bomb making materials clearly outlaw everything. In other words, this should have ended when the bomb squad guys said he didn't have a bomb. The TSA guys and the Sheriff's dept. could have said "oops, honest mistake, sorry for the inconvenience" and let him get on with his harmless life. Maybe there were extenuating circumstances that made it seem like he was more of a threat. None of those have been presented to us that I can find, so to assume the existence of such circumstances seems premature.
It's a solved problem in the same way that the Y2K problem was a solved problem since... well, I suppose since before there were computers to have a Y2K problem. Just don't store the date anywhere as a two digit decimal number. The Y2K problem only existed because of sloppy work that people assumed wouldn't still be in service when the millenium rolled around. Same thing for the 2038 problem. It may be the case by then that there's no legacy stuff around to have that problem, but there's no guaranty of that. The problem itself was already solved way back. It's not as if you need to have a 64 bit system to work with a 64 bit value. Future-proofing everything using a time value would have only been a tiny bit of extra work, it's just that most people didn't bother to do it.
Imagine that. A watch with switches. It's a bit harder to find watches with plastic-insulated wires, although there are plenty with uncoated wire or maybe even magnet wire.
If you do not know by now that the GED holding "Security Professionals" of the TSA would freak the fuck out over this then you are too stupid to be free.
But if your freedom subject to the whims of dumb goons, then you're not truly free in the first place.
Yes, if after they inspected it, determined that there was nothing harmful about it, as happened here.
We must have read different articles. In the article I read, they inspected it, determined that there was nothing wrong with it, then charged the guy with possessing materials to make an explosive device and locked him up anyway. Basically it's saving face. Just like in the Boston lite brite scare. The authorities don't want to look like over-reacting idiots, so it becomes even more important to them to charge the person with something. The people behind the Boston lite brite ads were brought up on bomb hoax charges and copped a plea jut to make it go away and the authorities get to pretend that they're not idiots, just the victims of tricksters. The same sort of thing will happen in this case. They have nothing on the guy, but they'll tell him if he pleads guilty to some ominous-sounding charge, he can walk with time served. He'll have to choose between taking the plea or spending the next decade in and out of jail and court dealing with this. If he takes the plea, then it's over quickly, if he doesn't, then he's going to have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars he probably doesn't have, and travel repeatedly to somewhere he doesn't live and he'll risk prison time if the prosecution can charm the jury, although he may also have a chance at a big payoff suing the city, sheriff, TSA, etc. eventually.
The only reason the kilogram isn't the SI unit for mass is because it was impractical at the time to make a physical object that was exactly one gram or to find a scale accurate enough, so they settled on a thousand gram physical object instead. In any case, I'm pretty sure you meant to say that the gram isn't the SI unit for weight. This is true, but is all but meaningless for most measurements taken on Earth, especially if you're getting your measurements with a balance type scale which, even if it's in ounces, is going to give you the same results on Earth or Mars or the Moon, or even in freefall if it's temporarily accelerated in the right direction.
I seriously doubt that Aristotle could have comprehended calculus or designed a Mars rover.
As much as I resent the lingering traces of Aristotle's sophistry (they still teach that "five senses" nonsense in schools), it seems almost unimaginable that, given a modern education from an early age, he would not have been able to understand calculus or design a Mars rover (to the extent that a single person can design a Mars rover, anyway). Anyone with average intelligence or above, no serious learning disabilities, and no aversion to learning can understand Calculus (at least its practical use, it might be a different story once they get to proving the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus and that sort of thing) and the basic principles of engineering required for at least high-level design of a Mars rover (bearing in mind that designing every aspect of such a rover and doing it well is generally considered beyond the abilities of a single person and is typically done in a team environment).
The problem is that it's completely non-violent white collar crime being treated as if it were a murder. There are some white collar crimes that can be considered to be in that ballpark, such as Bernie Madoff's giant Ponzi scheme. Of course, the scheme Madoff ran actually did lead to quite a few deaths. It seems very unlikely that the piracy scheme in this case did much more than cost the entertainment industry a relatively tiny amount of money.
Real cops are nothing like the way they are portrayed on TV or in films.
The cops portrayed in TV and films these days seem to violate the constitution a few times per episode but are still portrayed unquestioningly as the good guys. Since it's fiction, they also have ridiculously high closure rates on their cases. They also have a ridiculously high number of "ticking time bomb" situations where such things are portrayed as necessary and right. I would be fine with it as fiction, as long as people still maintain a realistic view of police in the real world, but too many people don't seem to be able to distinguish reality from fantasy.
Investigating compromising emanations such as from keyboards, mice, screens, etc. most certainly is a hacking technique, just as calling and pretending to be the telephone repairman who needs the numbers printed on the bottom of the router is a hacking technique.
The problem with the theory that is "works just fine" is how you know it works just fine. The justice system in the US works on the principle of giving people a choice between a plea bargain with a relatively small sentence and a jury trial with a significant risk of a much harsher punishment, guilty or innocent. Oh, and that jury trial comes with a price tag high enough to destroy a person's life, guilty or innocent. The logical choice for most individuals, even the innocent, is to take the plea bargain. Given that, it's really hard to figure out whether or not the system actually works. Prosecutors and police tend to skip this dilemma by looking at conviction rates and concluding that things are working perfectly, unless someone is found not guilty.
Finally, (on topic), the estimation of the dinosaur (predator?) standing 40 feet tall is truly awe-inspiring and reminds me to be thankful of whatever changed to make animals smaller.
I thought that too, but it turns out it's not 40 feet tall, but 40 feet long. So, it's more on the same scale as T. Rex rather than towering over it.
Ok. Clearly I have to go through this slowly and step by step.
First, we have:
Playing fast-and-loose with the truth wasn't limited to Romney, but his campaign was the only one that got caught out on it.
This should be fairly self-evidently a paradox. At least, either a paradox, or a statement from someone with special knowledge beyond that available to the general public. It's a safe bet to stick with a paradox until the original AC says otherwise.
Then, someone replies to that with:
if nobody else got caught, how do you know anyone else was doing it?
Pointing out the paradox and asking the original AC to address it.
Then, you come in, letting it whoosh over your head and respond:
We know because plenty of people got caught doing it on both sides. If you're not being willfully obtuse, you could have started reading here for some information on Democrat "spin": FactCheck.org [factcheck.org]
Now, here you're clearly missing the point. The AC you're replying to wasn't making any claims about whether or not both sides were doing it, they were addressing the logical paradox in the original post. Telling that that both sides were, in fact, caught out doing it doesn't somehow make the person pointing out the logical paradox wrong. The paradox in the original statement is still there, and the original AC who posted it hasn't responded to say "oops, I was wrong, both sides were caught out on it". You posting to say that the first AC was wrong doesn't somehow make the second AC wrong. The second AC is still right that there's a logical inconsistency in the post from the first AC.
I hope you learn that being intolerably smug in your ignorance doesn't make you better than those around you. When you completely miss the point, try to look back and just admit that you misread the context.
Why you are thinking that? If you have that kind of labor and resources, then there's little reason to do anything for preparation. You already have civilization and they can figure out things on their own. You certainly don't have the "We'll die of starvation, if you don't figure out how to make an assembly line of X".
The goal is clearly going to be to make more than one. Manufacturing on the very large scale may be a longer term goal, but it is the goal. just building one copy to sit on your bench doesn't make much sense. Why do you think that no information is better than having information?
Why are we speaking of microchips? Nobody, be they a Victorian engineer or not, is going to be able to make anything beyond the crudest integrated circuits without a considerable amount of infrastructure that no longer exists.
I'm speaking of microchips because they're a very good example of a technology that, even if you study an extant example and understand it perfectly in every detail, is extremely difficult to figure out how to manufacture if you don't know how to manufacture it. There are a lot of very hard problems that were figured out in order to manufacture it. Solving them all again can certainly be done in time, but even a short text summarizing the principles involved in microchip manufacture would cut decades off that time. The same thing is true of most technologies.
The context you missed is that the post you responded to was a rhetorical question addressing a logical inconsistency in the previous post. Responding that people on both sides were caught doing it doesn't resolve the paradox the original poster presented.
Well, the Balrogs were at least an order of Maiar with an affinity for darkness and fire. How much their appearance was a matter of choice or of base nature is unclear. In any case, Morgoth also had demons who served under the Balrogs as servants. The Balrogs were also referred to as demons themselves.
The big problem with the question of wings is Tolkein's poetic use of language. If he said that a character was flying, you needed context to tell if he meant literally or just that the character was travelling with speed. Given that he described the form of the Balrog in terms of shadow and mystery, it seems pretty hard to make any definitive statement on the subject. It is fun to argue about it with just a few sentences worth of description to go by though :)
But you think they'd have closed that security hole in 50 years time. It's not like they were Microsoft....
They were a telepathic species. It's quite possible that, in their society, there were no private thoughts. Given that, it's quite possible that they didn't even have any computer security to speak of.
That's the justification I use anyway.
The post you replied to was replying to a post that said:
Playing fast-and-loose with the truth wasn't limited to Romney, but his campaign was the only one that got caught out on it.
I really wish people would try to read and respond to comments in threaded conversations in context.
And that's naturally what's happening. Optimization when you don't know the circumstances under which the optimization is going to occur, is doomed to failure. My view is a working and secure machine shop plus competent people running that shop is most of the way back to your bootstrapping of civilization.
And I still think those people in the machine shop are going to be able to work better and faster if they actually have plans in hand that are designed with simple working conditions in mind. Even if they need to adapt things to what's available.
You're kidding me. That's a ridiculous level of testing. Just start running cups of coffee and see what breaks down the road.
This is where we seem to be thinking at cross purposes. I'm thinking in terms of creating an assembly line to provide a civilization with espresso machines, and you're thinking in terms of making a one-off to sit on your work bench for when you feel like a cup (obviously neither of us have addressed where the beans are coming from).
Well, it is pretty much true. Sure, there will be push times, such as right after the catastrophe starts or during harvest time, when you need to work all out. But there will also be a lot of downtime where you'll have time to tinker.
But in a situation where you die if you don't meet your deadline, there's no downtime if you don't make it through the push times. Well, technically there's an eternity of it.
Easier than dealing with documentation that just doesn't apply to your situation and doesn't give you enough information to make things work.
I still believe that having some documentation is better than nothing. I don't really see how nothing is better than something.
Neither is that important a consideration. Really, you're exaggerating the difficulty of this sort of thing.
I don't really think I am. The espresso machine was just an example. There are lots of things far more difficult that you would need to deal with. Also, reverse engineering something and learning exactly what it's composed of and how it works doesn't tell you how to build it. Give the most brilliant victorian engineer complete information on the composition and design of a microchip and they still wouldn't be able to build one. Having some instructions should help.
And it would be a lifetime well spent. I really don't see the point of your argument. Documentation, if it survives, is of some use and if it doesn't, then it is useless. We're pretty sure the machines will survive and a successful reengineering project will have gone beyond what documentation can do (such as actually build a working device using what you have at your disposal).
Given the hypothetical situation we're discussing, it would seem to be better spent bootstrapping an industrial base as fast as possible. To that end, nothing beats having a plan beforehand. Maybe we're arguing at cross purposes here. The point of the project in the article is to eventually document an entire end to end toolchain to build a modern industrial civilazation. Clearly, the documentation will be useless if it doesn't survive, but that's pretty much a tautology. Things that don't exist generally aren't much use. As useful as ingenuity and resourcefulness are in any given situation, they're even more useful if you apply them beforehand and actually prepare.
Why would it? An afternoon would do the job.
An afternoon to put a device through hundreds or thousands of heating/cooling pressurization/de-pressurization cycles and analyze all the faults that occur? Sure, why not.
Well, then you'll figure it out, if it's important enough.
Sure, because when you're constantly battling against the clock for survival in a hostile world, you have plenty of time. This is why I never bother to tie my horse. If it wanders off, I'll eventually find it, if it's important enough.
And there remains the question of how useful this knowledge will be? You won't have industrial civilization at your disposal. So a lot of the design considerations are simply irrelevant due to lack of that infrastructure. And it's likely that the documentation won't actually agree with the machine that was built. This is a common problem which reverse engineering neatly bypasses.
The problem of not having an industrial civilization at your disposal would seem to apply to reverse engineering as well. In fact, it would seem to be harder when dealing with reverse engineering of parts designed by engineers who take modern machining methods for granted as opposed to parts purpose-designed to be workable with simpler fabrication techniques. As for documentation agreeing with what's actually built, this is a common problem. Very often part of the real design of an article resides in the institutional memory of the organization that manufactures it. It's extremely common with software especially for the source itself to be the best and most up-to-date documentation. Nevertheless, the goal of this project is to produce rigorous and definitive documentation.
Also, as far as reverse engineering neatly bypassing that problem, it only works if the reverse engineering gives you absolute knowledge of not only the current composition of every part. Even that may not be enough, since it doesn't actually tell you _how_ to make the parts.