You are right, they did not keep the price artificially high. But price was irrelevant. The point of making bibles "closed source" was not to make money, it was to control access to the information by limiting the number of copies that were made, thus to keep people under the control of the church. Bibles were available only for the clergy, regardless of price.
the printing press won the award, i wouldn't have said it had the impact it could (and did) have immediately, as much knowledge and its dissemination was still controlled by few sources (such as the catholic church) - no open sourcing until the 17th-18th centuries:)
The printing press made possible the first open source publication, Gutenberg's Bible. Up until that time, the bible had been exclusively produced by the Church, and they kept the price so high that no one could afford one for themselves. So people had to go to their priest to have it read and interpreted to them. With the printing press came books cheap enough for people to buy, and so they learned to read for themselves.
The bible was the source code to the Church, and Gutenberg made it open. Soon after the source was released came the Reformation.
Re:I have a P3/500 in my laptop already...
on
Laptop Pentium IIIs
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· Score: 1
Isn't what you have described almost exactly the definition of a network computer (NC), except for the portable part? Actually, isn't it even closer to a dumb terminal? And haven't dumb terminals and the NC pretty much gone by the wayside? I think this may be because the networking is harder to do than putting all the parts into the laptop, but it may also be because if you made your ideal system, it would not need to be upgraded every year to keep up with the faster processors that are available - you'd just switch your connected system. Manufacturers have much higher margins on laptops than on desktop units, so they don't want to switch to the portable NC model.
Also, what would these idealized communications network you wish for cost? It sounds like it would be like a cellphone, but with much higher bandwidth. Who's going to pay for the new infrastructure for that?
This is probably the most prevalent bit of disinformation being spread today. Youth crime is not rising in America. It is, in fact, falling. Study the FBI's Uniform Crime Report (UCR), specifically see the arrest statistics sorted by age, to see that overall crime is down, both in actual numbers of crimes known and per capita. It would be more accurate to say that the reporting of youth crime by the news media is rising, not youth crime itself.
There is a reason for the spread of this lie, however, and that is to distract from the total failure of the immoral attack on human rights disguised as a war on drugs. The illusion of increasing crime, and the designation of scapegoats such as video games, disguises the failure of current government policy, leading to increasing the power government has, allowing it to push the failed policy even harder. A vicious cycle -- the more powerfully the government pushes its drug policy, the worse the policy fails; the more it fails, the more scapegoats the government uses to increase its power to push that policy.
By the way, the FBI page is not very conducive to reading the UCR. The sections with information are not linked, but they are there if you poke around enough.
the police alone would outnumber and outgun them, let alone the national guard.
While I agree with most of what you say, this part about the quick reaction of the police as an effective counter to an invading army made me think of the way it took over 4 hours for the Littleton police to react to 2 armed boys at Columbine High School. Extrapolating this (to a silly level, admittedly) to 500 invaders would make one expect them to take 2000 hours to respond, which is almost 3 months. More realistically, the police are not really ready to cope with a pair of gunmen with authentic automatic weapons, much less 500 with not only machine guns, but stingers, LAWs, and RPGs. Sorry, but the police could do nothing more than clear the civilian traffic out of the way of the invaders.
Meanwhile, it would take days to call up the Guard, unless they had already been put into some sort of ready mode during the buildup of tensions. Same with getting the Army out there, since there are very few troops sitting around ready to fight here, the way they are, or at least were, in Germany. The invaders would very easily be able to take their targets. Holding them for very long might be another story, but that may not be necessary - they just have to impress the people of their vulnerability, and the inability of the government to protect them in order to crush the political will to resist, even if all the invaders are destroyed in the counter-attack. Kind of like the way the Vietcong Tet offensive convinced Americans that war could not be won, even though it was a disaster militarily.
Power Projection. Perhaps the Chinese do not have the experience, but the invasion of Taiwan would be a matter of reaching ~80 miles for them, not really a projection, versus reaching ~7000 miles for the US. The Chinese would be able to use ground-based planes and helicopters to cross the strait, and small craft to sail it in a couple of hourse, while the US forces would be limited to carrier-based planes and heavy ships that would take about a week to arrive from San Diego.
I agree with what you say, with one extension: the use of gas in warfare was banned not because it deserves to be banned, but because it was a remarkably ineffective weapon. True, it made gruesome casualties of those it did affect, but it was very difficult to make those casualties where and when you wanted them, which defines an effective weapon. Perhaps gas warfare succeeds without being used simply by making enemy troops lug around their gas masks and waste precious training resources learning how to use them.
If the power plant is blown up with a missile, it stops making electricity. If the power plant's operating software is cracked, it stops making electricity. The difference is the cracking itself doesn't kill the guy running the plant. The bomb does. Either way, the hospital with the heart monitor is supposed to have an emergency generator, and having the power plant shut down from either cause would qualify as an emergency.
Far from solving the energy crisis, if the earth contains vast amounts of hydrocarbons, that would be scary indeed.
Only to neo-Luddites.
There is only a very limited amount of hydrocarbons that can be burned or released into the air without causing a runaway greenhouse effect that would kill most surface life very quickly.
Not all hydrocarbons that are used are released into the air. In fact, I would bet that as you read this, you are wearing hydrocarbon clothing, sitting on a hydrocarbon chair, with your hands resting on a hydrocarbon keyboard. Fact is, hydrocarbons are far too valuable to be using as fuel.
In fact, it sounds like he is claiming that there are more than enough hydrocarbons to use up all the oxygen on the surface when burned. If a volcanic eruption (or humans) caused that to be released, the end result would be something like Venus: an atmosphere very high in carbon dioxide and with extremely high temperatures. Who knows, maybe that's just what happened to Venus.
This is a very static view of the world. Current theory is that there was no free oxygen in Earth's atmosphere until green plants came along and broke down the CO2 to get the carbon they needed and released O2 as a waste product. In all likelihood, the major effect of an atmosphere very high in carbon dioxide would be an increase in plant growth, and an increase in the sedimentation rate of carbonates on the ocean floors. You can't look at a dynamic system with one change without looking at how that change affects the feedback loops built into the system.
...the temperature and pressures associated with melting of the crust should cause whatever oil in the rocks to turn into methane and disappear.
Methane is natural gas. It would not disappear, it would be trapped by the same solid rock that traps the oil. Even if your pressure/temperature breakdown theory is correct, which I am not sure about.
Sorry, this is no more clear to me. Tell you what would though:
I asked a lot of questions. Answer them. With statements, not more questions.
You have asked a lot of questions. Answer them.
And remember, we are talking about how things ought to be, not necessarily the way they are. Sometimes the way things are needs to be changed. That is the whole point of having discussions like this, to determine whether they need to change, and if so, how.
I say that this interpretation of speech is plainly wrong.
You say this as if it was some law of physics or something. So do you contend that there is no difference between commercial speech and political speech, or are you contending that all speech using an electronic medium is advertising, or that all advertising benefits only the rich and powerful? So you would consider issue ads (ooh, there's that nasty a word) by the ACLU that call for re-imposing price controls on heating oil to be subject to the same controls as advertising by Exxon to sell fuel oil to consumers? Sorry, I do not agree. But that is merely my opinion, not a law of physics. F=ma. Not a law of physics either, but it's close enough to fly space shuttles.
Speech is what comes out of your mouth, but it is still speech if you speak into a megaphone to amplify your voice while you speak from a soapbox in the park; it is still speech if you speak into a microphone so that it can be amplified so that everyone in the room with you can hear it; it is still speech if you speak into a microphone so that it can be taped and replayed in rooms that you are not in; it is still speech if you speak into a microphone so that it can be broadcast using radio waves to carry it to homes that receivers, even if it includes pictures along with it. If you contend that the sound that comes out of your mouth is speech but the exact same comes that comes out of a TV speaker is not speech, then where does it undergo that magic transmogrification from "speech" to "not speech" that causes it to lose the protection guaranteed in the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States?
I contend that it does not. I realize it is not the nature of malcontents to propose solutions, but you really have not made a positive contribution, merely declarations of what is wrong. Tell us what would be right.
Why are donations even required?...
public funding... may be a solution.
As others have noted, and even you admit by calling for public funding, regardless of where it comes from money is required for campaigning. By using donations, the money is given by those who have it to those candidates they choose, presumably because of agreement on policy. By using public funding, the money would taken from all taxpayers under the power of the state and given to the candidates chosen by the FEC. It would not matter whether the donor's agreed with the candidate's policy.
Or you could have a system whereby the taxpayer specified which candidate his donation goes to, but the only difference between that system and the system we have now is that the government would decide how much would be taken from each donor. Not donating would cease to be an option, meaning that the politicians would have a lot more money to work with, and it would create a lot of new jobs for the regulators. No additional benefit to the voters or the taxpayers, however.
let's just not allow people to ever personally have enough money to ever be able to buy more electoral power than anyone else.;)
Spoken like a true Communist. Of course, it would mean the end of the little guy who creates a web page and sells it to a corporation for big bucks, but then, that never happened to anyone you know, did it? How 'bout you, CmdrTaco?
Imagine if some good old billionaire decided to "buy a puppet", how many people do you think would not vote for the puppet solely because he got a billion dollars?
As opposed to running himself, where his personal contributions to his own campaign are unregulated. That must be what defeated Ross Perot. The fact that his politics were insane had nothing to do with it.
let's say that billionaire put up a website with multiple T3's, a couple of Sun E10k clustered, etc. costing millions of dollars hired 5 webmasters, etc. and all he had to do was put a little disclosure notice on the bottom... that would put more than a few people out of the running.
Whoop-de-freekin-doo. I think you are vastly overestimating the power of a website. Regardless of how big and how wonderful a site is, I doubt that it would influence more than a relative handful of voters.
Money is not speech. Advertising is not speech. Advertising is commerce. Commerce is already regulated by both the states and the government. Regulating and limiting money in no way, shape, or form prevents a human being from speaking his mind.
This confuses commercial advertising with political speech, and they are not the same thing, even if they use the same media.
Commercial advertising is commerce, and the constitution specifically grants the federal government the power to regulate it. The ways that lawmakers abuse this power is off-topic for this discussion. Commerce is about selling goods and services.
Political advertising is political speech, and constitution specifically prohibits the federal government from regulating it. Political advertising is about selling ideas and the people who propose to institute those ideas into government. Any and all regulations of political speech, even the many that already exist, are unconstitutional. They exist because they benefit the encumbents, oddly enough, the very ones who make the laws.
And that is why we can never have meaningful campaign regulations, or "reform", because the ones who make the rules are the ones who benefit from them. The only way to have the free speech that is the heart of political discussion is to have no government regulation of that speech whatsoever.
Public finance of political campaigns is a tool for increasing the power of government at the expense of the rights of the people, and will certainly lead to an increase in the power of incumbency. As a test case, ask yourself if Jesse Ventura would ever have been a serious candidate, much less been elected, under any kind of public finance scheme you have ever seen proposed.
at 1:19 Sunday 10 October 1999 CDT, dbrutus wrote:
Could it be that what creationists want is for evolution to not be given a state endorsement? Could it be that it isn't ramming creationism down people's throats that is the current situation but ramming evolution down people's throats? Read Darwin's Black Box and tell me that evolution is proven enough that we want the state to endorse it as a mandatory part of instruction and that it should be on the mandatory state tests. Diversity of permissible opinion is what creationists want because, frankly, creationists aren't that unified among themselves and it would be preferrable for the coercive power of the state to stay out.
Well, you may want people to believe that diversity may be what creationists want, but not a single one of the many I have ever talked to believes in diversity of belief. They have been very adamant that their beliefs are right and any different beliefs are wrong. What they want is the coercive power of the state endorsing their beliefs. That is why they have pushed through such things as banning the teaching of evolution in Kansas, and forced it to be taught as merely a theory in Texas. This is so much like the normal debating tactics of creationists, to ask questions that imply that they could be reasonable people, but when you watch the way they walk instead of listening to the way they talk, you see that the answer to these questions you've asked is always "NO."
Notice that none of the creationists in this thread has ever said anything positive. All they want to do is tear down evolution, not assert anything positive that has any of the tremendous power of explanation that evolution has.
I was surprised to note that dbrutus admits that creationists aren't unified among themselves. One of the main arguments that I have heard pushed by creationists is that evolutionists disagree about (the details of) how evolution works, therefore evolution is invalid. Never before have I seen a creationist admit that they disagree about (the main concept of) how creationism works. Bravo.
Actually both altitude and horizon would be important for this particular application:
Altitude, becase by exoatmospheric I assume they mean an altitude in excess of 200 miles, or outside of the Earth's atmosphere. At that height, g(antimissile) is 0.907g(surface_of_earth), which would make a huge impact on vector calculations.
Horizon, because they have to know what vector that 0.907g is coming from.
Close. You are correct in that you have to know the vector. You are incorrect in assuming that either altitude or horizon are components of the vector. The vector is a position vector in the (probably Aries Mean of 2000) inertial coordinate system, with components x,y,z consisting of distance (feet or meters) from the center of the earth along the axes. Considering only the central body effect, the force of gravity is computed using
for ( axis = 0; axis ( 3 ; axis++ ) f[axis] = (G * Me * Mi)/(R*R*R) * R[axis];
where Me = Mass of the earth, Mi = Mass of the interceptor, G = the universal gravity constant, R = the magnitude of the position vector , R[i] = the position of the interceptor in the inertial coordinate system, f[i] = the force acting on the interceptor caused by gravity.
Higher order effects are functions of latitude and longitude, which are easily derived from the position vector.
Exoatmospheric generally means above 100 km, or ~60 miles, though I doubt that this is a constraint in the targetting calculations, since it is better to have the intercept take place at a lower altitude than not at all.
Also, on the subject of navication by 4 stars, this would be useless for navigation on such a small scale, as that fourth star used for position on the plane would apear as stationary to the most sophisticated sensors available unless you're talking about a translation of nearly a million miles (and the surface of the sun is too inconstant to use it as a closer source).
Of course they appear stationary. That's why they can be used for navigation. To establish your position, you need to establish your position relative to points whose positions are known. What is the translation of nearly a million miles? The radius of the earth is 3444 nautical miles and is irrelevant to inertial navigation. The radius of the earth's orbit around the sun is ~93 million miles, and is still irrelevant to inertial navigation around the earth. The sun has no "surface." It is not a good navigation reference because it is too big and too bright to get an accurate fix on.
Might I recommend a course in orbital mechanics? You need really, really big wrenches.
Taking an historical perspective on software development, it is an art still in its infancy. The Programmer's Stone makes a reference to the design of cathedrals, how analysis using modern tools finds that they are well optimized. What it doesn't mention is that we only see the ones that survived. In the early days of cathedral building, many of them failed, literally crashing to the ground. Unfortunately for the people in them at the time, but fortunately for us, the failures were big enough that they could not be overlooked. And so the state of the art of cathedral building advanced with each failure.
Nowadays most software failures are considered annoyances rather than catastrophes. Because of this, they don't justify the time and money it would take to advance the state of the art of software development. Nothing will happen until users recognize how much software, and for that matter hardware, failures are costing them, and start refusing to pay those costs on top of what they are already paying for the software itself, and become willing to pay the upfront costs to stop them in future development. That recognition will not come until something catastrophic happens. It will only be when enough people die because of a software failure that enough attention will be paid to the state of the art to make some genuine advances. Until then we'll be stuck with meaningless exercises in paperwork such as ISO 9000.
Maybe then we can actually get some standards for hardware as well, so that the operating system doesn't care which sound card or which video card or which printer it has installed, just like when it sends email it doesn't care whether it is going to a Macintosh, a Linux box, a Windows machine, or a TV set.
It carries a computer that enables it to determine its location by the position of certain stars and then select the target and attack it. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but this sounds very hard to do. Astronavigation requires at least two astronomical bodies (OK, they've got that), reasonably accurate timing (that's easy) and a horizon.
It is non-trivial, but it is not hard (in the sense of the traveling-salesman problem being hard). But then, this is the technology that is being tested with this device.
Navigation in space does not require two astronical bodies and a horizon. That's what you need for navigating a boat in the bay. In space, you don't have a horizon, and you don't need one. All you need are four stars. Three to define a plane, and the fourth, outside the plane, to define your positon on the plane. In practice, you'd want more, but ideally, four is enough. By quickly updating this information and using the accurate clock, you can determine your position, velocity and acceleration, even if you don't use any accelerometer data or inertial nav.
Believe it or not, altitude is not at all important in the navigation, nor in guidance to rendezvous with your target, that is, meet in the same place at the same time.
Altitude = |R| - R(earth) is a trivial calculation useful only for display to the men monitoring the operation of the missile.
What's more likely is that it has star charts on board and looks for 'stars' that shouldn't be there. Then it attacks them. That could be a neat strategy.
Of course it has star charts on board, to choose the stars to use to navigate by. Using your method, you'd still to figure out where it is in relation to all the stars in order to pick out which one didn't belong. Much easier to use a different sensor (say, radar or lidar) to track the target and calculate its trajectory. Oh yes, you can't just aim at where the target is, because when you get there, it'll be gone. You have to calculate its trajectory in order to hit it.
Cool toy though.
I'm sure that's what James Watt's contemporaries said about his steam engine when he first demonstrated it.
No. They use solid propellants. Think about how long it takes to fuel up a space shuttle before a launch, and why that would be bad for an ICBM. Not to mention what it would take to distribute and store the cryogenic H2 and O2.
Isn't it amazing that this topic should come up so near The Programmer's Stone, and yet be seen as a different one? What makes intelligence is understanding, which is the basis of mapping knowledge. (Or is it vice versa?) Machines don't understand anything. Machines can keep a lot of things in memory at once, and perhaps even make connections between these things, but they never (yet) gain any understanding of deeper connections.
This was how Deckard spotted the replicants in Bladerunner. They knew the facts (packing), and even some connections between them, but not the meta-connections (mapping); at some level they failed to make connections that are obvious to most people.
The ability to understand is what makes us smarter than machines. No matter how big and fast the machines are, they don't have imaginary friends.
I seem to think about things just before someone in my immediate vicinity says something about it. This is an extremely common occurance,...
The only thing I could sum this up to is telepathy.
Or it could be simply that both of you are noticing and responding to the same stimuli. You would notice this especially when the conversation switches because the old conversational thread was running down and your minds were casting about for something to stimulate a new one. You happen to attend to the same one at the same time because you are both looking for it just then.
I could challenge such a bill on a number of constitutional grounds. I could claim that it violated due process, unreasonable search and ceisure, freedom of speech, and unnenumerated rights such as privacy. It wouldn't last six months
Start getting ready with this challenge, since the terms of this bill are nearly identical to those proposed for US law in the SAFE Act.
It requires that you must provide keys when demanded by law enforcement, provided they get a search warrant within 90 days (but only if they use it in court), and that you not tell anyone that you have decrypted anything.
Slashdot Mirror
You are right, they did not keep the price artificially high. But price was irrelevant. The point of making bibles "closed source" was not to make money, it was to control access to the information by limiting the number of copies that were made, thus to keep people under the control of the church. Bibles were available only for the clergy, regardless of price.
The bible was the source code to the Church, and Gutenberg made it open. Soon after the source was released came the Reformation.
Also, what would these idealized communications network you wish for cost? It sounds like it would be like a cellphone, but with much higher bandwidth. Who's going to pay for the new infrastructure for that?
There is a reason for the spread of this lie, however, and that is to distract from the total failure of the immoral attack on human rights disguised as a war on drugs. The illusion of increasing crime, and the designation of scapegoats such as video games, disguises the failure of current government policy, leading to increasing the power government has, allowing it to push the failed policy even harder. A vicious cycle -- the more powerfully the government pushes its drug policy, the worse the policy fails; the more it fails, the more scapegoats the government uses to increase its power to push that policy.
By the way, the FBI page is not very conducive to reading the UCR. The sections with information are not linked, but they are there if you poke around enough.
Meanwhile, it would take days to call up the Guard, unless they had already been put into some sort of ready mode during the buildup of tensions. Same with getting the Army out there, since there are very few troops sitting around ready to fight here, the way they are, or at least were, in Germany. The invaders would very easily be able to take their targets. Holding them for very long might be another story, but that may not be necessary - they just have to impress the people of their vulnerability, and the inability of the government to protect them in order to crush the political will to resist, even if all the invaders are destroyed in the counter-attack. Kind of like the way the Vietcong Tet offensive convinced Americans that war could not be won, even though it was a disaster militarily.
Power Projection.
Perhaps the Chinese do not have the experience, but the invasion of Taiwan would be a matter of reaching ~80 miles for them, not really a projection, versus reaching ~7000 miles for the US. The Chinese would be able to use ground-based planes and helicopters to cross the strait, and small craft to sail it in a couple of hourse, while the US forces would be limited to carrier-based planes and heavy ships that would take about a week to arrive from San Diego.
I agree with what you say, with one extension: the use of gas in warfare was banned not because it deserves to be banned, but because it was a remarkably ineffective weapon. True, it made gruesome casualties of those it did affect, but it was very difficult to make those casualties where and when you wanted them, which defines an effective weapon.
Perhaps gas warfare succeeds without being used simply by making enemy troops lug around their gas masks and waste precious training resources learning how to use them.
If the power plant is blown up with a missile, it stops making electricity.
If the power plant's operating software is cracked, it stops making electricity.
The difference is the cracking itself doesn't kill the guy running the plant. The bomb does.
Either way, the hospital with the heart monitor is supposed to have an emergency generator, and having the power plant shut down from either cause would qualify as an emergency.
- I asked a lot of questions. Answer them. With statements, not more questions.
- You have asked a lot of questions. Answer them.
And remember, we are talking about how things ought to be, not necessarily the way they are. Sometimes the way things are needs to be changed. That is the whole point of having discussions like this, to determine whether they need to change, and if so, how.Speech is what comes out of your mouth, but it is still speech if you speak into a megaphone to amplify your voice while you speak from a soapbox in the park; it is still speech if you speak into a microphone so that it can be amplified so that everyone in the room with you can hear it; it is still speech if you speak into a microphone so that it can be taped and replayed in rooms that you are not in; it is still speech if you speak into a microphone so that it can be broadcast using radio waves to carry it to homes that receivers, even if it includes pictures along with it. If you contend that the sound that comes out of your mouth is speech but the exact same comes that comes out of a TV speaker is not speech, then where does it undergo that magic transmogrification from "speech" to "not speech" that causes it to lose the protection guaranteed in the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States?
I contend that it does not. I realize it is not the nature of malcontents to propose solutions, but you really have not made a positive contribution, merely declarations of what is wrong. Tell us what would be right.
Or you could have a system whereby the taxpayer specified which candidate his donation goes to, but the only difference between that system and the system we have now is that the government would decide how much would be taken from each donor. Not donating would cease to be an option, meaning that the politicians would have a lot more money to work with, and it would create a lot of new jobs for the regulators. No additional benefit to the voters or the taxpayers, however.
Whoop-de-freekin-doo. I think you are vastly overestimating the power of a website. Regardless of how big and how wonderful a site is, I doubt that it would influence more than a relative handful of voters.
This confuses commercial advertising with political speech, and they are not the same thing, even if they use the same media.
Commercial advertising is commerce, and the constitution specifically grants the federal government the power to regulate it. The ways that lawmakers abuse this power is off-topic for this discussion. Commerce is about selling goods and services.
Political advertising is political speech, and constitution specifically prohibits the federal government from regulating it. Political advertising is about selling ideas and the people who propose to institute those ideas into government. Any and all regulations of political speech, even the many that already exist, are unconstitutional. They exist because they benefit the encumbents, oddly enough, the very ones who make the laws.
And that is why we can never have meaningful campaign regulations, or "reform", because the ones who make the rules are the ones who benefit from them. The only way to have the free speech that is the heart of political discussion is to have no government regulation of that speech whatsoever.
Public finance of political campaigns is a tool for increasing the power of government at the expense of the rights of the people, and will certainly lead to an increase in the power of incumbency. As a test case, ask yourself if Jesse Ventura would ever have been a serious candidate, much less been elected, under any kind of public finance scheme you have ever seen proposed.
Well, you may want people to believe that diversity may be what creationists want, but not a single one of the many I have ever talked to believes in diversity of belief. They have been very adamant that their beliefs are right and any different beliefs are wrong. What they want is the coercive power of the state endorsing their beliefs. That is why they have pushed through such things as banning the teaching of evolution in Kansas, and forced it to be taught as merely a theory in Texas. This is so much like the normal debating tactics of creationists, to ask questions that imply that they could be reasonable people, but when you watch the way they walk instead of listening to the way they talk, you see that the answer to these questions you've asked is always "NO."
Notice that none of the creationists in this thread has ever said anything positive. All they want to do is tear down evolution, not assert anything positive that has any of the tremendous power of explanation that evolution has.
I was surprised to note that dbrutus admits that creationists aren't unified among themselves. One of the main arguments that I have heard pushed by creationists is that evolutionists disagree about (the details of) how evolution works, therefore evolution is invalid. Never before have I seen a creationist admit that they disagree about (the main concept of) how creationism works. Bravo.
Close. You are correct in that you have to know the vector. You are incorrect in assuming that either altitude or horizon are components of the vector. The vector is a position vector in the (probably Aries Mean of 2000) inertial coordinate system, with components x,y,z consisting of distance (feet or meters) from the center of the earth along the axes. Considering only the central body effect, the force of gravity is computed using
for ( axis = 0; axis ( 3 ; axis++ )
f[axis] = (G * Me * Mi)/(R*R*R) * R[axis];
where
Me = Mass of the earth,
Mi = Mass of the interceptor,
G = the universal gravity constant,
R = the magnitude of the position vector ,
R[i] = the position of the interceptor in the inertial coordinate system,
f[i] = the force acting on the interceptor caused by gravity.
Higher order effects are functions of latitude and longitude, which are easily derived from the position vector.
Exoatmospheric generally means above 100 km, or ~60 miles, though I doubt that this is a constraint in the targetting calculations, since it is better to have the intercept take place at a lower altitude than not at all.
Of course they appear stationary. That's why they can be used for navigation. To establish your position, you need to establish your position relative to points whose positions are known. What is the translation of nearly a million miles? The radius of the earth is 3444 nautical miles and is irrelevant to inertial navigation. The radius of the earth's orbit around the sun is ~93 million miles, and is still irrelevant to inertial navigation around the earth. The sun has no "surface." It is not a good navigation reference because it is too big and too bright to get an accurate fix on.Might I recommend a course in orbital mechanics? You need really, really big wrenches.
Nowadays most software failures are considered annoyances rather than catastrophes. Because of this, they don't justify the time and money it would take to advance the state of the art of software development. Nothing will happen until users recognize how much software, and for that matter hardware, failures are costing them, and start refusing to pay those costs on top of what they are already paying for the software itself, and become willing to pay the upfront costs to stop them in future development. That recognition will not come until something catastrophic happens. It will only be when enough people die because of a software failure that enough attention will be paid to the state of the art to make some genuine advances. Until then we'll be stuck with meaningless exercises in paperwork such as ISO 9000.
Maybe then we can actually get some standards for hardware as well, so that the operating system doesn't care which sound card or which video card or which printer it has installed, just like when it sends email it doesn't care whether it is going to a Macintosh, a Linux box, a Windows machine, or a TV set.
It is non-trivial, but it is not hard (in the sense of the traveling-salesman problem being hard). But then, this is the technology that is being tested with this device.
Navigation in space does not require two astronical bodies and a horizon. That's what you need for navigating a boat in the bay. In space, you don't have a horizon, and you don't need one. All you need are four stars. Three to define a plane, and the fourth, outside the plane, to define your positon on the plane. In practice, you'd want more, but ideally, four is enough. By quickly updating this information and using the accurate clock, you can determine your position, velocity and acceleration, even if you don't use any accelerometer data or inertial nav.
Believe it or not, altitude is not at all important in the navigation, nor in guidance to rendezvous with your target, that is, meet in the same place at the same time.
Altitude = |R| - R(earth)
Of course it has star charts on board, to choose the stars to use to navigate by. Using your method, you'd still to figure out where it is in relation to all the stars in order to pick out which one didn't belong. Much easier to use a different sensor (say, radar or lidar) to track the target and calculate its trajectory. Oh yes, you can't just aim at where the target is, because when you get there, it'll be gone. You have to calculate its trajectory in order to hit it.I'm sure that's what James Watt's contemporaries said about his steam engine when he first demonstrated it.is a trivial calculation useful only for display to the men monitoring the operation of the missile.
No. They use solid propellants. Think about how long it takes to fuel up a space shuttle before a launch, and why that would be bad for an ICBM. Not to mention what it would take to distribute and store the cryogenic H2 and O2.
Isn't it amazing that this topic should come up so near The Programmer's Stone, and yet be seen as a different one? What makes intelligence is understanding, which is the basis of mapping knowledge. (Or is it vice versa?) Machines don't understand anything. Machines can keep a lot of things in memory at once, and perhaps even make connections between these things, but they never (yet) gain any understanding of deeper connections.
This was how Deckard spotted the replicants in Bladerunner. They knew the facts (packing), and even some connections between them, but not the meta-connections (mapping); at some level they failed to make connections that are obvious to most people.
The ability to understand is what makes us smarter than machines. No matter how big and fast the machines are, they don't have imaginary friends.
Or it could be simply that both of you are noticing and responding to the same stimuli. You would notice this especially when the conversation switches because the old conversational thread was running down and your minds were casting about for something to stimulate a new one. You happen to attend to the same one at the same time because you are both looking for it just then.
Start getting ready with this challenge, since the terms of this bill are nearly identical to those proposed for US law in the SAFE Act.
It requires that you must provide keys when demanded by law enforcement, provided they get a search warrant within 90 days (but only if they use it in court), and that you not tell anyone that you have decrypted anything.
The newer machines don't have the ROMs. They use a "Mac OS ROM file" that is copied into RAM.