I'm going to lose my shit if you damned CS majors don't stop trying to correlate local weather to the frigging climate! It's a fucking non-linear system. Small scale does not equate to large scale behavior, in space or time.
Will you *please* go read up on chaos theory? At least smoke some weed and read 'Chaos' by James Gleik, try to see some pictures. Read A First Course in Turbulence by Tennekes and Lumley. I mean, shit, chaos theory has been around for longer than most of you have been alive. Read a goddamned book once in a while. The dead tree kind of book.
Maybe I need some weed.
The universe is filled with non-linear chaotic systems. Earth's climate is part of one. Deal with it!
DUH!
Didn't need a computer program to tell me that. OP needs to get out of the basement and hang out for an hour at the nearest bus station. It should be an eye-opening experience.
Sometimes leaving stuff that works alone is fine. Actually that's a good general engineering practice.
Most engineering failures occur when "outdated" technology gets replaced with new shiny (because, new shiny!), and the new shiny bites you in the ass with the unexpected.
Not to say that things shouldn't be updated if the technology improves, but if you just need a relatively robust low tech computer technology, sticking with what works isn't such a bad thing.
Shale gas isn't being exploited because it is cleaner than oil (though it is). It is being exploited because we are trying to get oil, and all the easy-to-get oil is about gone. Oil and gas often co-exist in the same formations, so if you are digging hard for oil you tend to get a lot of gas.
We've had some technology breakthroughs that let us extract this gas and oil from shales which will keep things going for a while. Enjoy it while it lasts, because after it is gone, it's gone.
The tragic thing is that the temporarily low oil and gas prices do make it difficult to transition to renewable technologies as it removes the cost impetus. The problem is that many renewable infrastructures will require decades to construct, while oil and gas prices will fluctuate wildly in the space of months or a year. When it runs out, fuel prices will go through the roof, and we'll be sitting a decade or more away from a replacement energy system.
There was actually very good infrastructure in place for liquid fuel engines since kerosene (for lanterns and such) was widely available and sold in metered amounts from pumps in the late 1800s. It was not nearly the stretch to extend that network for gasoline dispensing as it would be to build a completely new infrastructure for hydrogen fuel.
Hydrogen, from generation to storage to use, is a bad, inconvenient, and very expensive idea.
A long time ago I might have supported organizations like Greenpeace and PETA on general principles, but the membership of both organizations have grown so outrageously batshit insane and arrogant that I feel differently now.
I feel like roasting a live cat over a pile of burning coal, frankly.
What people are missing is that this is meant (mostly) for inbound missile defense. It isn't a matter of *pew* *pew* *pew* *BOOM*; a sustained beam is held on target for a fairly long period of time (up to a second).
Also works well against motor boats and other third world potential mass suicide attack.
Thank you for thinking out of the box and kicking ass Lt. Gen. Riper!
Warthogs? A-10s are some of the least-expensive, easiest to maintain aircraft in the USAF inventory, and their role in CAS is unrivaled.
Cut a handful of F-35s and you've saved about as much money and probably made our military more combat ready.
It seems the tech industry is doing everything it can to increase the population of code monkeys in the world, and finding new ways to work them harder and harder for less and less pay.
So that is how the Singularity will be achieved - enough monkeys beating on keyboards, eventually one of them will inadvertently make sentient computer. And it will be Wi-fi enabled, of course, so we're pretty much hosed after that.
This could work, but it would involve MS, you know, actually listening to its customers and actually working to deliver what they want. Maybe take a class in Business 101 and learn to actually give your customers what the want? Stop laughing, I'm being crazy, I know, I know..
MS's track record of "listening to customer feedback" generally has boiled down to shoving some new half-baked OS up their user's asses and wondering months later why they are still moaning and groaning so loudly.
Paying a monthly subscription for the honor of trying to recover my former levels of productivity after MS fucks up the GUI for the Nth time? No. Fuck no.
Given that we have only managed to get 12 men to our own freakin moon for brief visits in our entire history, and can't seem to find the wherewithal to send any more any time soon, this doesn't seem like a profound conclusion to me.
Gripe about Google all you want, but GMail is a pretty solid product IMO. If they decide to replace it, they had better have *DAMN* good reason to do so, and they need to have the users on board with the change *BEFORE* they do it. Just talking about changing such a solid and deeply absorbed product makes my buttcheeks clench. If they screw it up it means lots of miserable people.
I hope Google has seen the Windows H8 debacle and truly will listen to it's revenue-generating eyeballs (not customers, but drivers of ad revenue). Poking the eyeballs, well, in the eye, will hurt their bottom line just as badly as MS boldly going where their customers did not want them to go.
The respect issue goes both ways. A lot of cops don't work in the neighborhoods that they live in. They either can't afford to live there, like in Boston, or don't want to live there, like [insert ghetto / slum of your choice here]. There is very often an "us versus them" mentality where everyone is treated like a terrorist or felon. Really hard to show respect to authority when it seems to be stepping on your neck all of the time. A lot of cops are professional in these instances, but a lot of cops also feel that they are going on combat patrol in a foreign country and act accordingly.
Where do you see good police / citizen interactions? Places where the police actually live where they patrol and patrol where they live.
We should have been at this point 48 years ago. Oh wait, we were!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
But we dumped all this and forgot it, so it all has to be relearned again by this generation.
But even AS-201 was nearly a full production stack. EFT-1 is merely using Delta IV to lob it out into space to see if it will burn up on re-entry or not. Not even close to a full stack. The SLS this thing is supposed to ride on is barely beyond Powerpoint stage.
I highly doubt we'll see another NASA astronaut on the moon in my lifetime (and I'm a healthy 40 year old). I actually think it is more likely that Elon Musk will land there on his way to Mars to party with his "crew" of exotic dancers.
I agree. We've been hearing about the miraculous strength to weight, low-calorie sweetening, non-stick and other properties of graphene for decades. Yet bridges are still built of steel, bullet-resistant vests are still Kevlar. Seems like it works great at lab / microscale but does not scale-up nicely to commercial applications.
Can someone who actually knows what they are talking about (I know, I know; I'm on/., silly me) clue us in on what the difficulties are with commercializing graphene?
What the material is doing (or is claimed to do, anyway) is to re-radiate incident radiation at a wavelength that can pass through through the atmosphere back out to space without being absorbed (i.e. it won't heat up the atmosphere). Since the surface can absorb heat due to convection from the air, it can re-radiate that heat as well into space.
This material is not merely reflective, its radiation properties are such that essentially acts as a refrigerator; it can pull heat from the air and radiate it to space.
Slashdot Mirror
HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!!!!!!
HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!!!!!!
HAA HAA HAA HAA HAA HAA HAA!!!!!!
Oh God, that was funny! *SNORT*.
I'll let you in on a secret (*snicker*):
If you're on the web, you're walking down the street shouting your secrets to the world.
The way to keep your privacy is to keep your mouth shut.
I'm going to lose my shit if you damned CS majors don't stop trying to correlate local weather to the frigging climate! It's a fucking non-linear system. Small scale does not equate to large scale behavior, in space or time.
Will you *please* go read up on chaos theory? At least smoke some weed and read 'Chaos' by James Gleik, try to see some pictures. Read A First Course in Turbulence by Tennekes and Lumley. I mean, shit, chaos theory has been around for longer than most of you have been alive. Read a goddamned book once in a while. The dead tree kind of book.
Maybe I need some weed.
The universe is filled with non-linear chaotic systems. Earth's climate is part of one. Deal with it!
Yep...I do need some weed.
DUH! Didn't need a computer program to tell me that. OP needs to get out of the basement and hang out for an hour at the nearest bus station. It should be an eye-opening experience.
Sometimes leaving stuff that works alone is fine. Actually that's a good general engineering practice.
Most engineering failures occur when "outdated" technology gets replaced with new shiny (because, new shiny!), and the new shiny bites you in the ass with the unexpected.
Not to say that things shouldn't be updated if the technology improves, but if you just need a relatively robust low tech computer technology, sticking with what works isn't such a bad thing.
Too bad the major news networks are probably airing this from every angle, live. I bet the jihadis know how to use TVs too.
Shale gas isn't being exploited because it is cleaner than oil (though it is). It is being exploited because we are trying to get oil, and all the easy-to-get oil is about gone. Oil and gas often co-exist in the same formations, so if you are digging hard for oil you tend to get a lot of gas.
We've had some technology breakthroughs that let us extract this gas and oil from shales which will keep things going for a while. Enjoy it while it lasts, because after it is gone, it's gone.
The tragic thing is that the temporarily low oil and gas prices do make it difficult to transition to renewable technologies as it removes the cost impetus. The problem is that many renewable infrastructures will require decades to construct, while oil and gas prices will fluctuate wildly in the space of months or a year. When it runs out, fuel prices will go through the roof, and we'll be sitting a decade or more away from a replacement energy system.
There was actually very good infrastructure in place for liquid fuel engines since kerosene (for lanterns and such) was widely available and sold in metered amounts from pumps in the late 1800s. It was not nearly the stretch to extend that network for gasoline dispensing as it would be to build a completely new infrastructure for hydrogen fuel.
Hydrogen, from generation to storage to use, is a bad, inconvenient, and very expensive idea.
A long time ago I might have supported organizations like Greenpeace and PETA on general principles, but the membership of both organizations have grown so outrageously batshit insane and arrogant that I feel differently now.
I feel like roasting a live cat over a pile of burning coal, frankly.
Way to win hearts and minds, idiots!
A lot of them are getting re-winged, a pretty cost-intensive process. The airframes are really tired.
What people are missing is that this is meant (mostly) for inbound missile defense. It isn't a matter of *pew* *pew* *pew* *BOOM*; a sustained beam is held on target for a fairly long period of time (up to a second).
Also works well against motor boats and other third world potential mass suicide attack.
Thank you for thinking out of the box and kicking ass Lt. Gen. Riper!
Warthogs? A-10s are some of the least-expensive, easiest to maintain aircraft in the USAF inventory, and their role in CAS is unrivaled. Cut a handful of F-35s and you've saved about as much money and probably made our military more combat ready.
It seems the tech industry is doing everything it can to increase the population of code monkeys in the world, and finding new ways to work them harder and harder for less and less pay. So that is how the Singularity will be achieved - enough monkeys beating on keyboards, eventually one of them will inadvertently make sentient computer. And it will be Wi-fi enabled, of course, so we're pretty much hosed after that.
This could work, but it would involve MS, you know, actually listening to its customers and actually working to deliver what they want. Maybe take a class in Business 101 and learn to actually give your customers what the want? Stop laughing, I'm being crazy, I know, I know..
MS's track record of "listening to customer feedback" generally has boiled down to shoving some new half-baked OS up their user's asses and wondering months later why they are still moaning and groaning so loudly.
Paying a monthly subscription for the honor of trying to recover my former levels of productivity after MS fucks up the GUI for the Nth time? No. Fuck no.
That's nice. You're still not an engineer though.
Mod this up please! Genuine humor right after I burned all my points.
Given that we have only managed to get 12 men to our own freakin moon for brief visits in our entire history, and can't seem to find the wherewithal to send any more any time soon, this doesn't seem like a profound conclusion to me.
Well no, but you're the first second post. I hope that makes you feel good, down there in your mommy's basement.
Gripe about Google all you want, but GMail is a pretty solid product IMO. If they decide to replace it, they had better have *DAMN* good reason to do so, and they need to have the users on board with the change *BEFORE* they do it. Just talking about changing such a solid and deeply absorbed product makes my buttcheeks clench. If they screw it up it means lots of miserable people. I hope Google has seen the Windows H8 debacle and truly will listen to it's revenue-generating eyeballs (not customers, but drivers of ad revenue). Poking the eyeballs, well, in the eye, will hurt their bottom line just as badly as MS boldly going where their customers did not want them to go.
...dirt.
They can afford to pay for them by not buying up surplus military equipment like they were equipping the army of some banana republic.
The respect issue goes both ways. A lot of cops don't work in the neighborhoods that they live in. They either can't afford to live there, like in Boston, or don't want to live there, like [insert ghetto / slum of your choice here]. There is very often an "us versus them" mentality where everyone is treated like a terrorist or felon. Really hard to show respect to authority when it seems to be stepping on your neck all of the time. A lot of cops are professional in these instances, but a lot of cops also feel that they are going on combat patrol in a foreign country and act accordingly. Where do you see good police / citizen interactions? Places where the police actually live where they patrol and patrol where they live.
We should have been at this point 48 years ago. Oh wait, we were! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A... But we dumped all this and forgot it, so it all has to be relearned again by this generation. But even AS-201 was nearly a full production stack. EFT-1 is merely using Delta IV to lob it out into space to see if it will burn up on re-entry or not. Not even close to a full stack. The SLS this thing is supposed to ride on is barely beyond Powerpoint stage. I highly doubt we'll see another NASA astronaut on the moon in my lifetime (and I'm a healthy 40 year old). I actually think it is more likely that Elon Musk will land there on his way to Mars to party with his "crew" of exotic dancers.
I agree. We've been hearing about the miraculous strength to weight, low-calorie sweetening, non-stick and other properties of graphene for decades. Yet bridges are still built of steel, bullet-resistant vests are still Kevlar. Seems like it works great at lab / microscale but does not scale-up nicely to commercial applications. Can someone who actually knows what they are talking about (I know, I know; I'm on /., silly me) clue us in on what the difficulties are with commercializing graphene?
What the material is doing (or is claimed to do, anyway) is to re-radiate incident radiation at a wavelength that can pass through through the atmosphere back out to space without being absorbed (i.e. it won't heat up the atmosphere). Since the surface can absorb heat due to convection from the air, it can re-radiate that heat as well into space. This material is not merely reflective, its radiation properties are such that essentially acts as a refrigerator; it can pull heat from the air and radiate it to space.
Your understanding of the process could use some polishing too.