Teflon is not, to my knowledge, very elastic. It's essentially a rigid plastic. Condoms need to be able to stretch and experience, ahem, rather extreme dynamic loads during use. They need to be quite stretchy so that they don't tear.
You can already do this using pseudo-random number generators. While pseudo-random numbers may not be random enough for certain scientific computation purposes, they are more than adequate for gaming. There seems to be a common misconception that computers are incapable of producing randomness. Pseudo-random number-generating algorithms, seeded with simple things like the system time and keyboard events, are good enough for 99% of common everyday computing tasks.
The advantage of this 'approximate computing' is that the hardware may be able to use less power. The randomness is a drawback, not a virtue.
JPEG is not a scaling algorithm. It is a (lossy) image compression format. By 'compression', I mean it allows you to compress the file size (measured in bytes) -- not the image dimensions (measured in pixels). It has nothing to do, really, with resizing an image.
Scaling algorithms are things like point sampling, bilinear interpolation, bicubic interpolation, etc.
Decimal: 1 bit can be one of 10 different values, so five times more information is present in a single bit.
No, that's not what a bit is. 'Bit' is short for 'binary digit'. A bit can, by definition, only hold one of two possible states. It is a fundamental unit of information. A decimal digit comprises multiple bits. Somewhere between 3 and 4 bits per decimal digit.
Most people don't have the faintest clue how technology works. It might as well be magic to them. Therefore, when people see things like the Terminator franchise, Battlestar Galactica, that terrible I, Robot movie, etc., the concept of a robot uprising seems plausible to them.
If you don't mind waiting a long time, perhaps you could use solar sails? Although, I'd guess that solar sails are only useful for providing radial acceleration (i.e. away from the sun), so this might not be useful if you're mining the stuff beyond the earth's orbit and are trying to bring it back home. And I doubt there's an analogue to "tacking" in the vacuum of space.
An alternative is to use solar cells to provide electrical power, and use the copper itself as propellant in some sort of high-efficiency ion engine or accelerator. You'd be cannibalizing your payload to use as reaction mass. Copper probably isn't an ideal propellant in such a system, but if you have billions of tons of it, you probably don't mind wasting a significant fraction of it.
A third option could be nuclear pulse propulsion. Something like the orion project?
It was my understanding that, if you look at a phase diagram for any material, there may well be many distinct solid phases but only one liquid phase. How can you have different phases of liquid?
I am running the latest stable Firefox on Windows 7 with a 1280x800 display (not huge, but certainly not a small resolution compared to today's laptops). The little text box is cut off at the edge of the screen.
Also, may I add that there is far too much wasted space. I can only fit about 1 - 1.5 headlines on my screen at a time. I prefer a simple text-based layout where the headlines are packed together tightly. This allows me to quickly scan the headlines to see if there's an article worth reading. What's the point of having these useless images and whitespace? It just forces me to manually scroll the page more. The images add nothing of value and just increase bloat.
Remember, Slashdot's core readership is IT professionals, engineers, scientists, STEM students, etc. People who value function over aesthetics. If you sacrifice the former for the latter (and I don't even think the new design is an improvement aesthetically), you will drive away those readers.
The golden rule is K.I.S.S: Keep It Simple, Stupid.
> This will be an interesting experiment for Occulus VR.
How would this be different from the decades of accumulated anecdotal evidence from people playing video games? I know from personal experience that just because I'm playing a fast-paced game, doesn't mean that my perception of time will eventually slow down. As I progress through a game's learning curve, I get better, but this is more of a twitchy reflex type of thing. I don't really feel my conscious thought processes speed up at all.
Well, just because a hypothesis seems like it would be true, doesn't mean that it is necessarily true. It's good that scientists are actually studying this to find out, instead of just assuming. That's the point of science, really. To test out hypotheses and learn new things.
Mcelrath wasn't asking what a spectrometer was. His point was that this particular spectrometer doesn't have the resolution required to do anything interesting, like identify chemical compounds.
As commenters on the IB Times page have pointed out, the embedded video restarts when the page auto-refreshes. This ruins the viewing experience. I recommend watching the video directly on youtube.
That's quite different. While it's a parallel process, nothing's being extruded. It's stereolithography, which means that a resin is being cured one layer at a time. Commercial systems like this exist (which use a projector to expose an entire layer at a time, rather than raster scanning a laser across it). A major limitation is that you can only make things out of photo-curable resin. If someone were to develop a parallel extrusion system as Stoutlimb suggested, you would be able to use a much larger variety of materials.
So you really went to all the trouble of typing that comment, which presumably included some quick fact-checking to get your numbers right, and you didn't bother to re-read the title? I mean, I know it's SOP by now to not read the article, and I guess reading the summary is getting passe these days. But you didn't even read the title?
I guess from now on, we should just stop after reading the first three letters of the title, and base our comments off that. Or better yet, we should just skip the title and base our discussion on the submission's category icon.
I think what ChromeAeonium was saying is that this is better than using traditional fertilizers, specifically because it wouldn't result in dead zones.
The ISS is no place to be storing large amounts of rocket fuel. You would want to keep that well away from a crewed facility
Why? Assuming they'd be using a bipropellant fuel combo like hydrogen / oxygen, it would make sense for them to store the fuel and oxidizer in separate tanks. What would be the danger? If one of the tanks were to rupture, all that would happen is the fuel would leak into space. It's only a danger if the two gases mix, and if you kept the two tanks far enough away from each other, I don't see that happening.
Slashdot Mirror
purposefully
Purposely. Purposefully means something else.
Teflon is not, to my knowledge, very elastic. It's essentially a rigid plastic. Condoms need to be able to stretch and experience, ahem, rather extreme dynamic loads during use. They need to be quite stretchy so that they don't tear.
You can already do this using pseudo-random number generators. While pseudo-random numbers may not be random enough for certain scientific computation purposes, they are more than adequate for gaming. There seems to be a common misconception that computers are incapable of producing randomness. Pseudo-random number-generating algorithms, seeded with simple things like the system time and keyboard events, are good enough for 99% of common everyday computing tasks.
The advantage of this 'approximate computing' is that the hardware may be able to use less power. The randomness is a drawback, not a virtue.
JPEG is not a scaling algorithm. It is a (lossy) image compression format. By 'compression', I mean it allows you to compress the file size (measured in bytes) -- not the image dimensions (measured in pixels). It has nothing to do, really, with resizing an image.
Scaling algorithms are things like point sampling, bilinear interpolation, bicubic interpolation, etc.
Decimal: 1 bit can be one of 10 different values, so five times more information is present in a single bit.
No, that's not what a bit is. 'Bit' is short for 'binary digit'. A bit can, by definition, only hold one of two possible states. It is a fundamental unit of information. A decimal digit comprises multiple bits. Somewhere between 3 and 4 bits per decimal digit.
Most people don't have the faintest clue how technology works. It might as well be magic to them. Therefore, when people see things like the Terminator franchise, Battlestar Galactica, that terrible I, Robot movie, etc., the concept of a robot uprising seems plausible to them.
I'd rather be blind than have a bullet to the head.
Funny, I'd rather the opposite.
Poe's law applies here. That discussion thread -- they're not serious, are they? It must be a subtle troll, no?
If you don't mind waiting a long time, perhaps you could use solar sails? Although, I'd guess that solar sails are only useful for providing radial acceleration (i.e. away from the sun), so this might not be useful if you're mining the stuff beyond the earth's orbit and are trying to bring it back home. And I doubt there's an analogue to "tacking" in the vacuum of space.
An alternative is to use solar cells to provide electrical power, and use the copper itself as propellant in some sort of high-efficiency ion engine or accelerator. You'd be cannibalizing your payload to use as reaction mass. Copper probably isn't an ideal propellant in such a system, but if you have billions of tons of it, you probably don't mind wasting a significant fraction of it.
A third option could be nuclear pulse propulsion. Something like the orion project?
It was my understanding that, if you look at a phase diagram for any material, there may well be many distinct solid phases but only one liquid phase. How can you have different phases of liquid?
See screenshot here: http://i.imgur.com/JBNcRAL.png
I am running the latest stable Firefox on Windows 7 with a 1280x800 display (not huge, but certainly not a small resolution compared to today's laptops). The little text box is cut off at the edge of the screen.
Also, may I add that there is far too much wasted space. I can only fit about 1 - 1.5 headlines on my screen at a time. I prefer a simple text-based layout where the headlines are packed together tightly. This allows me to quickly scan the headlines to see if there's an article worth reading. What's the point of having these useless images and whitespace? It just forces me to manually scroll the page more. The images add nothing of value and just increase bloat.
Remember, Slashdot's core readership is IT professionals, engineers, scientists, STEM students, etc. People who value function over aesthetics. If you sacrifice the former for the latter (and I don't even think the new design is an improvement aesthetically), you will drive away those readers.
The golden rule is K.I.S.S: Keep It Simple, Stupid.
> This will be an interesting experiment for Occulus VR.
How would this be different from the decades of accumulated anecdotal evidence from people playing video games? I know from personal experience that just because I'm playing a fast-paced game, doesn't mean that my perception of time will eventually slow down. As I progress through a game's learning curve, I get better, but this is more of a twitchy reflex type of thing. I don't really feel my conscious thought processes speed up at all.
Well, just because a hypothesis seems like it would be true, doesn't mean that it is necessarily true. It's good that scientists are actually studying this to find out, instead of just assuming. That's the point of science, really. To test out hypotheses and learn new things.
AC's joke is that people on meth tend to hallucinate things like bugs and spiders.
Mcelrath wasn't asking what a spectrometer was. His point was that this particular spectrometer doesn't have the resolution required to do anything interesting, like identify chemical compounds.
So again. . . what is it useful for?
As commenters on the IB Times page have pointed out, the embedded video restarts when the page auto-refreshes. This ruins the viewing experience. I recommend watching the video directly on youtube.
It means that young people had higher rates of death from all causes compared to people who drank less coffee.
Google image search?
That's quite different. While it's a parallel process, nothing's being extruded. It's stereolithography, which means that a resin is being cured one layer at a time. Commercial systems like this exist (which use a projector to expose an entire layer at a time, rather than raster scanning a laser across it). A major limitation is that you can only make things out of photo-curable resin. If someone were to develop a parallel extrusion system as Stoutlimb suggested, you would be able to use a much larger variety of materials.
So you really went to all the trouble of typing that comment, which presumably included some quick fact-checking to get your numbers right, and you didn't bother to re-read the title? I mean, I know it's SOP by now to not read the article, and I guess reading the summary is getting passe these days. But you didn't even read the title?
I guess from now on, we should just stop after reading the first three letters of the title, and base our comments off that. Or better yet, we should just skip the title and base our discussion on the submission's category icon.
I think what ChromeAeonium was saying is that this is better than using traditional fertilizers, specifically because it wouldn't result in dead zones.
I can run a simulation on my home computer and have it run at 10^-100 slower than it would run on the cluster at work
I'd like to see this cluster which runs 10e100 times faster than a desktop. Is it perhaps powered by a neutron star?
The ISS is no place to be storing large amounts of rocket fuel. You would want to keep that well away from a crewed facility
Why? Assuming they'd be using a bipropellant fuel combo like hydrogen / oxygen, it would make sense for them to store the fuel and oxidizer in separate tanks. What would be the danger? If one of the tanks were to rupture, all that would happen is the fuel would leak into space. It's only a danger if the two gases mix, and if you kept the two tanks far enough away from each other, I don't see that happening.