They have a romantic attachment to manned space flight, while everyone under 40 finds it completely natural to project a presence miles away while sitting at the controls in a dark room. I don't remember electing you as Representative for my age group.
Are those earth years Of course they are. Can't be bothered with a quick Wikipedia search?
or martial years? You mean "Martian" I guess.
See that "Preview" button? Congratulations: sanctimonious, hypocritical, and ironic, all in four small words!
a VR processor cannot logically exist within the virtual reality its processing creates. It is logically impossible for a processor to create itself because the virtual world creation could not start if a processor did not initially exist outside it.
I'm not sure I understand or agree with this. That certainly does seem to miss some fairly fundamental computer science results, like Universal Turing machines, which can simulate any other Turing machine, including themselves.
Look at the average IQ of a nation and you can tell how impoverished it will be. Northern Asia and Japan are high-IQ; Viet Nam is low IQ. Russia is low IQ, Mexico is low IQ, and Africa is low IQ. Even in the US states we can see that states with a lower balance of smart people are more impoverished.
That's science. If you can't face it, mod down -1 and claim I'm a "Troll" to formalize your impotence. That's not science. That's a correlation. Correlation does not imply causality. Are the IQ tests biased in favour of the US because they were developed in the US? If the IQ tests are unbiased, are 3rd-world IQs low because 3rd-world countries have inferior educations? etc. etc.
In my teens, I was a real aggressive jerk of a driver. I never had an accident either.
You can't draw any conclusion from the fact that you have had no accidents. 99% of the time, you can't tell the difference between having a 1/100 chance of an accident versus 1/1000000.
The problem remains: there is no way for the average computer user to log-out of their iDisk on public computers. If it uses cookies, you could delete all cookies before you leave.
Having taken the time to write all that, I'm not sure it's true now. I think it takes about the same fuel to get from the Moon to pretty much any low Earth orbit you want, including the one with the ISS in it.
Too bad. I thought that was a pretty good explanation, except that it's wrong.:-)
Seriously, why not just do the moon mission, then pick up the landing bags as the ISS on the way home.
The moon and the ISS are orbiting in planes 45 apart. It would require a prohibitive amount of fuel to get from the moon to the ISS. They'd pretty much need another fuel tank and another pair of solid rocket boosters to get there.
Traveling in space is not like traveling on the ground. On the ground, if you want to go somewhere, you only have to move to its position. In space, getting to a given position is the easy part; it's getting to the right velocity at that position that is hard.
For instance, if you want to go from Earth to the Moon, you can do it with no fuel whatsoever if you don't care about your starting or ending velocity: a Hohmann transfer orbit lets you coast to the Moon and back without any effort at all. The hard part of the journey is that when you're in low Earth orbit, you're not going the right velocity to be on a transfer orbit; and then when your transfer orbit gets to the Moon, you're not going the right velocity to land there. You need a burn at Earth and another one at the Moon to get your velocity right.
This is not like travel on the ground. In general, you can't just accelerate your car, shut off the engine, and coast to your destination. On the ground, travel is dominated by friction and obstacles. Distance is what costs. The fuel required to get up to highway speed is tiny compared with the fuel required to travel even one mile. Because of that, we talk about miles per gallon. If you want to calculate your fuel cost for a trip, you base it on how many miles you'll travel.
In space, there are no friction or obstacles. You get up to the right velocity, coast for some time, then slow down again. The fuel required during the coasting phase is insignificant compared with the fuel required to change velocity. To plan the fuel cost for a chemical rocket trip, you base it on the total "delta V", or total change in velocity. Distance and duration don't figure into the calculation.
Changing the plane of an orbit is one of the most expensive maneuvers there is. With some exceptions (like sun synchronous orbits), there are no shortcuts: you just have to burn enough fuel to cancel your velocity in one direction and gain velocity in the desired direction.
Copyright law limits your right to copy things. GPL gives you back some of those rights if you satisfy certain conditions. The GPL is not relevant for activities that don't involve copying.
If you make a copy of a binary, then give it away without source, then you have violated the GPL. If you receive a CD with binaries from someone who has complied with the GPL, then give it away without source code or offer of source code, I don't see how anyone has broken any law. Seems like a bit of a loophole.
This exact point was made in the story's summary:
Marisa Mayer, Google's vice president responsible for everything on the search page, says that 'it's possible just to become too dry, too corporate, too much about making money' and the 'I'm Feeling Lucky,' button reminds you that 'people here have personality.' Web usability expert Jacob Nielsen says the whimsy serves another business purpose: 'Oh we're just two kind of grad students hanging out and having a beer and having a grand old time,' not you know, 'We are 16,000 people working on undermining your privacy.'"
Nup. Really really fancy high-precision clocks already cope with leap seconds. Simpler medium-precision systems can cope using a variable skew so the leap seconds are absorbed over a longer period (say, hours). Sorry, I don't understand. Leap seconds are introduced at rather arbitrary intervals by a standards body. What clocks could "cope" with that, yet not be able to "cope" with leap minutes?
If leap seconds come too often, and leap hours allow the time to diverge too much, how about leap minutes? Official time doesn't deviate from solar time by much, and yet we only need one every hundred years or so.
Of course, this doesn't fix the real problem: that the Earth's rotation is gradually slowing, so any system based on a foundation with a fixed number of fixed-length seconds will always become gradually more unwieldy.
Slashdot Mirror
But a computer can simulate itself doing something other than simulating itself.
Uh...
What were we talking about again?
I'm not sure I understand or agree with this. That certainly does seem to miss some fairly fundamental computer science results, like Universal Turing machines, which can simulate any other Turing machine, including themselves.
That's science. If you can't face it, mod down -1 and claim I'm a "Troll" to formalize your impotence. That's not science. That's a correlation. Correlation does not imply causality. Are the IQ tests biased in favour of the US because they were developed in the US? If the IQ tests are unbiased, are 3rd-world IQs low because 3rd-world countries have inferior educations? etc. etc.
In my teens, I was a real aggressive jerk of a driver. I never had an accident either.
You can't draw any conclusion from the fact that you have had no accidents. 99% of the time, you can't tell the difference between having a 1/100 chance of an accident versus 1/1000000.
There is known to be a backdoor, but nobody knows what it is. That's the part that's secret.
So?
Wikipedia has policies and guidelines for this. Include it if it's notable, and not original research, etc.
I once new a guy who could compute the prime roots of 15 in his head.
Having taken the time to write all that, I'm not sure it's true now. I think it takes about the same fuel to get from the Moon to pretty much any low Earth orbit you want, including the one with the ISS in it.
:-)
Too bad. I thought that was a pretty good explanation, except that it's wrong.
The moon and the ISS are orbiting in planes 45 apart. It would require a prohibitive amount of fuel to get from the moon to the ISS. They'd pretty much need another fuel tank and another pair of solid rocket boosters to get there.Seriously, why not just do the moon mission, then pick up the landing bags as the ISS on the way home.
Traveling in space is not like traveling on the ground. On the ground, if you want to go somewhere, you only have to move to its position. In space, getting to a given position is the easy part; it's getting to the right velocity at that position that is hard.
For instance, if you want to go from Earth to the Moon, you can do it with no fuel whatsoever if you don't care about your starting or ending velocity: a Hohmann transfer orbit lets you coast to the Moon and back without any effort at all. The hard part of the journey is that when you're in low Earth orbit, you're not going the right velocity to be on a transfer orbit; and then when your transfer orbit gets to the Moon, you're not going the right velocity to land there. You need a burn at Earth and another one at the Moon to get your velocity right.
This is not like travel on the ground. In general, you can't just accelerate your car, shut off the engine, and coast to your destination. On the ground, travel is dominated by friction and obstacles. Distance is what costs. The fuel required to get up to highway speed is tiny compared with the fuel required to travel even one mile. Because of that, we talk about miles per gallon. If you want to calculate your fuel cost for a trip, you base it on how many miles you'll travel.
In space, there are no friction or obstacles. You get up to the right velocity, coast for some time, then slow down again. The fuel required during the coasting phase is insignificant compared with the fuel required to change velocity. To plan the fuel cost for a chemical rocket trip, you base it on the total "delta V", or total change in velocity. Distance and duration don't figure into the calculation.
Changing the plane of an orbit is one of the most expensive maneuvers there is. With some exceptions (like sun synchronous orbits), there are no shortcuts: you just have to burn enough fuel to cancel your velocity in one direction and gain velocity in the desired direction.
The fact that most offenders re-offend doesn't imply that most crimes are committed by re-offenders.
Tell your car's charger you never want it less than 80% full. Problem solved.
Not only that: it would take deep ignorance to think every child in Africa is starving, and would prefer rice to an education.
Maybe it's the same process that led them to a two-party system.
You've seen this I hope?
Copyright law limits your right to copy things. GPL gives you back some of those rights if you satisfy certain conditions. The GPL is not relevant for activities that don't involve copying.
If you make a copy of a binary, then give it away without source, then you have violated the GPL. If you receive a CD with binaries from someone who has complied with the GPL, then give it away without source code or offer of source code, I don't see how anyone has broken any law. Seems like a bit of a loophole.
Sorry, Ms. Poppins, I didn't realize life was so simple.
Even if you don't change a line of code, you still have to distribute (or offer to distribute) source if you're distributing the binaries.
Really really fancy high-precision clocks already cope with leap seconds.
Simpler medium-precision systems can cope using a variable skew so the leap seconds are absorbed over a longer period (say, hours). Sorry, I don't understand. Leap seconds are introduced at rather arbitrary intervals by a standards body. What clocks could "cope" with that, yet not be able to "cope" with leap minutes?
If leap seconds come too often, and leap hours allow the time to diverge too much, how about leap minutes? Official time doesn't deviate from solar time by much, and yet we only need one every hundred years or so.
Of course, this doesn't fix the real problem: that the Earth's rotation is gradually slowing, so any system based on a foundation with a fixed number of fixed-length seconds will always become gradually more unwieldy.
Seriously, have you seen it lately? The only resemblance with the old show is that the puppets have the same names.