Well, actually, I can think of plenty of ways you could be "set up" to "have an affair" as long as "have an affair" remains in quotes. Quite simply, a supervisor at work could require you to work late on various nights but arrange it in such a way that you have no proof that you really worked late. Then they could bring out someone they've hired to claim to have had an affair with you and tell your spouse that you were lying about working late. Maybe they could give you a company credit card as well, then throw some hotel charges onto it.
People with lots of power over you, like employers, have plenty of power to frame you all sorts of things. For example, if they wanted to fire you for whistleblowing, they could set up an environment where employees are made comfortable by supervisors leaving 5 minutes early every day, but marking their full hours on their timesheet. Then they could gather "evidence" against you, such as by tracking your car with a gps tracking device, and then fire you, or maybe even prosecute you, for fraudulently filling out your timecard. Who would believe you? It's a time-honoured tradition for getting rid of unwanted employees: give them implicit, or even explicit (but undocumented) permission to do something that's technically against policy, then bust them for violating the policy.
Square-Cube ratio. Or rather, sphere-radius to sphere volume ratio. Larger payloads are a lot harder to land with an airbag system than small ones like the Mars rovers. As the payload gets more massive, the size (and complexity) of the airbag you need to safely stop all of its kinetic energy increases more. That's why the up and coming Mars rover, which is the size of a compact car, is not going to be landed with an airbag system.
Hmm. That got me thinking, anyone have the numbers on the maximum speed an object can reach falling towards the moon? If it started say from the earth-moon Lagrange point with no relative momentum?
The GP is, I believe, making a joke about the corrupt political process through which most NASA parts are sourced (by congressmen who know nothing about rocketry) and which often becomes an overriding factor in their design. Basically, congress tells NASA that they will use engines from _this_ manufacturer, in _this_ district, then NASA has to design the rest of the mission around what that manufacturer can actually provide them. ATK bought the Thiokol rocket division (after a few intermediate splits and mergers), who were the mandated provider of solid rocket boosters for the shuttle program. It's actually quite possible that, had they not been mandated, solid rocket boosters might not have even been used for the shuttle. In any case, the location of the manufacture of the rockets required that they be shipped in sections and then re-assembled with some o-rings between the sections. The o-rings were known to wear nearly all the way through on all shuttle launches up until Challenger blew up because one wore all the way through.
Official reports did put most of the blame on Morton-Thiokol for the Challenger disaster. There's a reasonably convincing case that, if NASA had been given a choice in providers, the disaster would have never happened. Of course, it would be unfair not to mention that, even if produced locally, or somewhere that the rockets could be delivered by sea, completing the entire solid rocket booster in one pour would be a challenge, so it might have needed to be segmented anyway. Of course, they might not have gone with solid boosters...
Rockets are made through intelligent design and _artificial_ selection. Rocket designs that explode during testing generally don't get to have unmodified offspring.
Here's a better question: do we allow engineers to be sued for engineering designs that failed due to an earthquake? The answer is that we do if the earthquake was smaller than the design was required to be able to handle by local building codes and/or the engineers certification. In the case of gross negligence or fraud, the engineer can even get criminal charges like manslaughter. If the earthquake was above the level the design was required to handle, then we don't (unless the collapse somehow revealed some sort of inherent flaw that would have allowed it to fail in a smaller earthquake, I suppose).
The engineer is responsible for designing, testing and overseeing construction. The seismologist didn't build the earth, only knows how it's made up through observation, inductive and deductive reasoning, and sometimes guesswork, and is extremely limited in what actual tests they can conduct. If a seismologist actually performed some sort of testing that could lead to an earthquake, it's currently looking like, depending on locale, they would be held legally responsible for any damage, injury, or death. So, the seismologist has pretty much no power to prevent earthquakes, while an engineer has a huge amount of power to prevent their designs from failing inside operating conditions.
As others have pointed out, the "prison system" is actually an industry in many cases now. As a for-profit industry, they don't benefit from anything that reduces the conviction rate and/or the length of sentences. Apparently, the prison industry also lobbies the government. I don't know if anything could be more blatantly corrupt than a situation where a for-profit industry, with government as its sole client, is spending money to influence government. Most companies in other industries, like construction, can actually legally have non-government clients. Even companies that have never worked for anyone but government in their entire history can at least pretend that they could get private money too.
Regarding _Going Postal_, I would have to argue that the protagonist isn't shown plundering rich, undeserving people. He had thought of himself that way, but he was rather starkly confronted with the fact that his cons hurt plenty of others. For example, Mr. Pump calculates for him that he's effectively killed 2.338 people based on all the direct and indirect suffering he's caused. Not to mention discovering that his love interest used to work as a bank teller and that he'd passed off counterfeit bonds to her, resulting in her firing.
If I recall correctly, Postal 2 had missions like going to the store and buying some milk, picking up a paycheck, etc. I think the designers intentionally made it so that you could get through the entire game non-violently, but all of the actual "fun" in the game came from playing violently.
At this point though, I don't want batteries to be smaller and lighter as much as I want them to improve in long-term reliability. Seriously, it seems like a laptop battery only goes a few months before it won't carry enough charge for it to be useful.
The Church-Turing thesis itself is generally considered to be the foundation of computer science. Turings work in it was based on his Turing Machines. Turing machines were also intended specifically for computer science research whereas Lambda Calculus was originally more geared towards exploring the fundamentals of mathematics itself. So, I think it's fair to give both Alan Turing and Turing Machines a pretty major place in CS history.
Sorry, can you explain how lambda calculus and "primitive recursive functions" are equivalent to a Turing machine. Are you saying that they're equivalent in the same way a pile of bricks is equivalent to a building. If that's the case, you're not really saying much.
FRY: This is a great, as long as you don't make me smell Uranus. Heh heh. LEELA: I don't get it. PROFESSOR FARNSWORTH: I'm sorry, Fry, but astronomers renamed Uranus in 2620 to end that stupid joke once and for all. FRY: Oh. What's it called now? PROFESSOR FARNSWORTH: Urectum.
One might be able to argue that the reward would be the large profits that they would make during the initial introduction of the toy. Arguing that they shouldn't lose profits to imitators rings a little hollow when they themselves are imitators.
Interesting. I just looked for information on a patent on the hula hoop and found this article with this paragraph in it:
Melina and Knerr were inspired to develop the Hula-Hoop after they saw a wooden hoop that Australian children twirled around their waists during gym class. Wham-O began producing a plastic version of the hoop, dubbed "Hula" after the hip-gyrating Hawaiian dance of the same name, and demonstrating it on Southern California playgrounds. Hula-Hoop mania took off from there.
Hurray for patents then. Hurray for intellectual property in general. Stealing ideas from the public domain, staking an unfair claim on them, and profiting from day one.
Yes, I know. But that hardly meets the plug and play simplicity people seem to want from a fax machine. I was thinking more along the lines of a service that actually provides the domain for you rather than the user having to go to a domain name registrar and register a new domain or a subdomain under their existing domain. For that matter, there's no reason that every fax machine should have its own subdomain. Addresses more like e-mail addresses would seem to be more appropriate. For example billing_fax@bobsmutualinsurance.com.
I should add though, that I only mean modern fax machines. There were purely electromechanical fax machines back in the days of the telegraph. It actually pre-dates the telephone.
I wasn't trying to troll. Just trying to point out that the GP's point that a fax machine is different from a computer is invalid since a fax machine is, in fact, a computer. So, you don't have a comparison between a simple device of one sort and a complicated device of another sort. They're both the same sort of device, but one of them has had a simplified interface slapped and certain peripherals slapped onto it and the other is designed for more general purpose and free-form use.
But modern fax machines still contain general purpose computers. They don't have a simple interface for programming them, but they are fully programmable devices if you want to hack them.
The fax machine concept itself isn't outdated, it's just the technology in use in them that's outdated. All they need for an update is a higher quality scanner built in and to be updated to communicate over the Internet. The big problem with that is, of course, NAT (Network Address Translation). Thanks to the scarcity of IPV4 addresses, nearly every device "on the Internet" is not really on the Internet as it isn't directly addressable and has a non-routable IP address. So, to use something like a fax machine over the Internet, either everyone who wants to use one has to do some complicated (for the average person who just wants to plug it in and have it work) DMZ setup in their router/gateway, or all the fax machines need to communicate through servers using some sort of protocol like email. Maybe when we move to IPV6, as long as the ISPs don't screw it up and every device can get an IP address, fax devices could communicate directly and essentially be plug and play. There would need to be some method to ensure that the device is consistently given the same IP address however. Plus, IPV6 addresses are a little too long and complicated to hand out as easily as phone numbers... Plus, fax spamming would become an even more severe problem. It may turn out that some sort of intermediate server that provides permanent, easily human-readable, addresses along with some sort of authentication/real-life identification system might be best.
Does a fusion-based nuclear warhead represent net positive fusion I wonder? Obviously it has to be triggered by a fission reaction and it takes a lot of energy to refine the fissile material. How about the energy to get the required hydrogen isotopes? I have to assume that it's a lot less than the energy you can get out of them otherwise we'd have already abandoned any hope of sustained fusion. So, I guess my question is if fusion has to be sustained to be considered net positive?
I've seen the suggestion that fusion power would be achievable today by building a huge cavern (maybe put a roof over some existing huge pit), lining it with pipes, then dropping about one fusion bomb a day into it to heat up the cavern.
The summary says that they have the potential to be "more powerful", also smaller. It's hard to imagine any way that doesn't mean brighter. If they could find a way to distribute the same amount of light from a much larger area efficiently, that would be much better as it wouldn't blind oncoming cars at night.
Isn't May Day on May 1st, not 5th? In any case, International Workers Day and Beltane are celebrated on the same day and, depending on region are probably mixed. The actual Haymarket massacre happened on May 4th, but people had been shot on May 3rd and the actual protest for the eight hour working day had begun on May 1st. It's possible that day was chosen due to it being an existing holiday (although not celebrated much in the US that I'm aware), but it was probably a coincidence. Today, there are plenty of countries that celebrate International Workers Day on May 1st which have absolutely no tradition of celebrating Beltane.
Interesting thing that I hadn't really been aware of is that the US actually does celebrate May 1st. It apparently started in 1921 as "Americanization Day" as a way to counter International Workers Day. In 1959, it officially became "Loyalty Day" as a sort of anti-communist holiday. I find all of this rather creepy.
Labor day in the US has nothing to do with the War of Independence. It is the US version of International Workers Day (May Day). It's a Union/socialist holiday. Interestingly, May Day actually commemorates a US event: the Haymarket Massacre in Chicago. For political reasons, in the US, they didn't want to commemorate the massacre, so opted for a more generic Labor day in September promoted by the Central Labor Union.
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Well, actually, I can think of plenty of ways you could be "set up" to "have an affair" as long as "have an affair" remains in quotes. Quite simply, a supervisor at work could require you to work late on various nights but arrange it in such a way that you have no proof that you really worked late. Then they could bring out someone they've hired to claim to have had an affair with you and tell your spouse that you were lying about working late. Maybe they could give you a company credit card as well, then throw some hotel charges onto it.
People with lots of power over you, like employers, have plenty of power to frame you all sorts of things. For example, if they wanted to fire you for whistleblowing, they could set up an environment where employees are made comfortable by supervisors leaving 5 minutes early every day, but marking their full hours on their timesheet. Then they could gather "evidence" against you, such as by tracking your car with a gps tracking device, and then fire you, or maybe even prosecute you, for fraudulently filling out your timecard. Who would believe you? It's a time-honoured tradition for getting rid of unwanted employees: give them implicit, or even explicit (but undocumented) permission to do something that's technically against policy, then bust them for violating the policy.
Square-Cube ratio. Or rather, sphere-radius to sphere volume ratio. Larger payloads are a lot harder to land with an airbag system than small ones like the Mars rovers. As the payload gets more massive, the size (and complexity) of the airbag you need to safely stop all of its kinetic energy increases more. That's why the up and coming Mars rover, which is the size of a compact car, is not going to be landed with an airbag system.
Hmm. That got me thinking, anyone have the numbers on the maximum speed an object can reach falling towards the moon? If it started say from the earth-moon Lagrange point with no relative momentum?
The GP is, I believe, making a joke about the corrupt political process through which most NASA parts are sourced (by congressmen who know nothing about rocketry) and which often becomes an overriding factor in their design. Basically, congress tells NASA that they will use engines from _this_ manufacturer, in _this_ district, then NASA has to design the rest of the mission around what that manufacturer can actually provide them. ATK bought the Thiokol rocket division (after a few intermediate splits and mergers), who were the mandated provider of solid rocket boosters for the shuttle program. It's actually quite possible that, had they not been mandated, solid rocket boosters might not have even been used for the shuttle. In any case, the location of the manufacture of the rockets required that they be shipped in sections and then re-assembled with some o-rings between the sections. The o-rings were known to wear nearly all the way through on all shuttle launches up until Challenger blew up because one wore all the way through.
Official reports did put most of the blame on Morton-Thiokol for the Challenger disaster. There's a reasonably convincing case that, if NASA had been given a choice in providers, the disaster would have never happened. Of course, it would be unfair not to mention that, even if produced locally, or somewhere that the rockets could be delivered by sea, completing the entire solid rocket booster in one pour would be a challenge, so it might have needed to be segmented anyway. Of course, they might not have gone with solid boosters...
Rockets are made through intelligent design and _artificial_ selection. Rocket designs that explode during testing generally don't get to have unmodified offspring.
Here's a better question: do we allow engineers to be sued for engineering designs that failed due to an earthquake? The answer is that we do if the earthquake was smaller than the design was required to be able to handle by local building codes and/or the engineers certification. In the case of gross negligence or fraud, the engineer can even get criminal charges like manslaughter. If the earthquake was above the level the design was required to handle, then we don't (unless the collapse somehow revealed some sort of inherent flaw that would have allowed it to fail in a smaller earthquake, I suppose).
The engineer is responsible for designing, testing and overseeing construction. The seismologist didn't build the earth, only knows how it's made up through observation, inductive and deductive reasoning, and sometimes guesswork, and is extremely limited in what actual tests they can conduct. If a seismologist actually performed some sort of testing that could lead to an earthquake, it's currently looking like, depending on locale, they would be held legally responsible for any damage, injury, or death. So, the seismologist has pretty much no power to prevent earthquakes, while an engineer has a huge amount of power to prevent their designs from failing inside operating conditions.
As others have pointed out, the "prison system" is actually an industry in many cases now. As a for-profit industry, they don't benefit from anything that reduces the conviction rate and/or the length of sentences. Apparently, the prison industry also lobbies the government. I don't know if anything could be more blatantly corrupt than a situation where a for-profit industry, with government as its sole client, is spending money to influence government. Most companies in other industries, like construction, can actually legally have non-government clients. Even companies that have never worked for anyone but government in their entire history can at least pretend that they could get private money too.
Regarding _Going Postal_, I would have to argue that the protagonist isn't shown plundering rich, undeserving people. He had thought of himself that way, but he was rather starkly confronted with the fact that his cons hurt plenty of others. For example, Mr. Pump calculates for him that he's effectively killed 2.338 people based on all the direct and indirect suffering he's caused. Not to mention discovering that his love interest used to work as a bank teller and that he'd passed off counterfeit bonds to her, resulting in her firing.
If I recall correctly, Postal 2 had missions like going to the store and buying some milk, picking up a paycheck, etc. I think the designers intentionally made it so that you could get through the entire game non-violently, but all of the actual "fun" in the game came from playing violently.
At this point though, I don't want batteries to be smaller and lighter as much as I want them to improve in long-term reliability. Seriously, it seems like a laptop battery only goes a few months before it won't carry enough charge for it to be useful.
The Church-Turing thesis itself is generally considered to be the foundation of computer science. Turings work in it was based on his Turing Machines. Turing machines were also intended specifically for computer science research whereas Lambda Calculus was originally more geared towards exploring the fundamentals of mathematics itself. So, I think it's fair to give both Alan Turing and Turing Machines a pretty major place in CS history.
Fair enough. Of course, pointing to a thesis named in part after Turing is a pretty paradoxical way to diminish his role in founding computer science.
Sorry, can you explain how lambda calculus and "primitive recursive functions" are equivalent to a Turing machine. Are you saying that they're equivalent in the same way a pile of bricks is equivalent to a building. If that's the case, you're not really saying much.
FRY: This is a great, as long as you don't make me smell Uranus. Heh heh.
LEELA: I don't get it.
PROFESSOR FARNSWORTH: I'm sorry, Fry, but astronomers renamed Uranus in 2620 to end that stupid joke once and for all.
FRY: Oh. What's it called now?
PROFESSOR FARNSWORTH: Urectum.
One might be able to argue that the reward would be the large profits that they would make during the initial introduction of the toy. Arguing that they shouldn't lose profits to imitators rings a little hollow when they themselves are imitators.
Interesting. I just looked for information on a patent on the hula hoop and found this article with this paragraph in it:
Hurray for patents then. Hurray for intellectual property in general. Stealing ideas from the public domain, staking an unfair claim on them, and profiting from day one.
Yes, I know. But that hardly meets the plug and play simplicity people seem to want from a fax machine. I was thinking more along the lines of a service that actually provides the domain for you rather than the user having to go to a domain name registrar and register a new domain or a subdomain under their existing domain. For that matter, there's no reason that every fax machine should have its own subdomain. Addresses more like e-mail addresses would seem to be more appropriate. For example billing_fax@bobsmutualinsurance.com.
I should add though, that I only mean modern fax machines. There were purely electromechanical fax machines back in the days of the telegraph. It actually pre-dates the telephone.
I wasn't trying to troll. Just trying to point out that the GP's point that a fax machine is different from a computer is invalid since a fax machine is, in fact, a computer. So, you don't have a comparison between a simple device of one sort and a complicated device of another sort. They're both the same sort of device, but one of them has had a simplified interface slapped and certain peripherals slapped onto it and the other is designed for more general purpose and free-form use.
But modern fax machines still contain general purpose computers. They don't have a simple interface for programming them, but they are fully programmable devices if you want to hack them.
The fax machine concept itself isn't outdated, it's just the technology in use in them that's outdated. All they need for an update is a higher quality scanner built in and to be updated to communicate over the Internet. The big problem with that is, of course, NAT (Network Address Translation). Thanks to the scarcity of IPV4 addresses, nearly every device "on the Internet" is not really on the Internet as it isn't directly addressable and has a non-routable IP address. So, to use something like a fax machine over the Internet, either everyone who wants to use one has to do some complicated (for the average person who just wants to plug it in and have it work) DMZ setup in their router/gateway, or all the fax machines need to communicate through servers using some sort of protocol like email. Maybe when we move to IPV6, as long as the ISPs don't screw it up and every device can get an IP address, fax devices could communicate directly and essentially be plug and play. There would need to be some method to ensure that the device is consistently given the same IP address however. Plus, IPV6 addresses are a little too long and complicated to hand out as easily as phone numbers... Plus, fax spamming would become an even more severe problem. It may turn out that some sort of intermediate server that provides permanent, easily human-readable, addresses along with some sort of authentication/real-life identification system might be best.
A fax machine is a computer.
Does a fusion-based nuclear warhead represent net positive fusion I wonder? Obviously it has to be triggered by a fission reaction and it takes a lot of energy to refine the fissile material. How about the energy to get the required hydrogen isotopes? I have to assume that it's a lot less than the energy you can get out of them otherwise we'd have already abandoned any hope of sustained fusion. So, I guess my question is if fusion has to be sustained to be considered net positive?
I've seen the suggestion that fusion power would be achievable today by building a huge cavern (maybe put a roof over some existing huge pit), lining it with pipes, then dropping about one fusion bomb a day into it to heat up the cavern.
The summary says that they have the potential to be "more powerful", also smaller. It's hard to imagine any way that doesn't mean brighter. If they could find a way to distribute the same amount of light from a much larger area efficiently, that would be much better as it wouldn't blind oncoming cars at night.
Isn't May Day on May 1st, not 5th? In any case, International Workers Day and Beltane are celebrated on the same day and, depending on region are probably mixed. The actual Haymarket massacre happened on May 4th, but people had been shot on May 3rd and the actual protest for the eight hour working day had begun on May 1st. It's possible that day was chosen due to it being an existing holiday (although not celebrated much in the US that I'm aware), but it was probably a coincidence. Today, there are plenty of countries that celebrate International Workers Day on May 1st which have absolutely no tradition of celebrating Beltane.
Interesting thing that I hadn't really been aware of is that the US actually does celebrate May 1st. It apparently started in 1921 as "Americanization Day" as a way to counter International Workers Day. In 1959, it officially became "Loyalty Day" as a sort of anti-communist holiday. I find all of this rather creepy.
Labor day in the US has nothing to do with the War of Independence. It is the US version of International Workers Day (May Day). It's a Union/socialist holiday. Interestingly, May Day actually commemorates a US event: the Haymarket Massacre in Chicago. For political reasons, in the US, they didn't want to commemorate the massacre, so opted for a more generic Labor day in September promoted by the Central Labor Union.