I'm confused, since when is pro-free-market, anti-union considered liberal? Liberals usually lean towards government regulation and allowing unions around here. They also tend to be against free trade insomuch as the pandering to the base ("we won't let your jobs go overseas!") propaganda goes.
The SSC being shut down still makes me mad. The politicians still consider it a win though, since they shut down that "wasteful government racetrack for microscopic particles".
But I've heard plenty of Koreans scoff at how WoW just hands you everything on a silver platter. Even the epic mount quest can easily be done in a single session. You're not persevering unless it requires a solid week of farming to unlock something. This does tend to come from the Lineage and Lineage II crowd though, who I fear may have warped perceptions.
If doing the small range of things over and over again to advance the game isn't "grind", then I'm not sure what that word means. Granted, all MMOs suffer from that to one degree or another, it's inherent in the system because it takes far longer to create new content than it does to play through it, the only way to extend game play is to make the players repeat the content several times. The difference is in the variety of tasks you can ask them to perform, how long they have to work on one task before they can move on to another, and the amount of effort you put into "distractions", like the storyline, exploring, etc...
To be clear, when I say eastern MMOs, I'm talking about ones created in Korea or Japan. When I say western MMOs, I'm talking about ones created in the US or Canada. I'm sure people in Europe or the Middle East have created some too, but I can't think of any off of the top of my head. Examples of eastern MMOs include Lineage and Fly For Fun. Examples of western MMOs include World of Warcraft and City of Heroes.
In my experiance, that works great until you have to go somewhere with crappy connectivity. Sometimes real life will make a mockery of your best laid plans.
From what I've seen, a bridge between Eastern and Western MMOs is going to be difficult. Eastern MMOs tend to reward hard work and perseverance, whereas western players tend to dislike excessive grind. Even the business models differ, with a lot of eastern MMOs being "free to play" but having a lot of in-game items that need to be purchased with real money. Western MMOs tend to have monthly fees, but discourage or outright ban using actual money in a way that influences gameplay.
If you have customer (or business!) data on a laptop, there is really no reason at all to not have full disk encryption on it. Laptops are stolen all of the time and this is the sort of publicity your company does not need.
Even then you're running into issues of scale. Assuming the the 1.0e-18 is acceleration over a millisecond period, it will take over 317 years to register one thousandth of a percent difference in the velocity. You really have to get out of human scales to get clobbered by lack of precision. That's not to say you should ignore the problem, but in practice the number of times you run into it should be low. Granted, NASA is one of the entities more likely than most to have these sorts of problems, but even then it's not that common.
Perhaps, but the whole reason floating point is "good enough" most of the time is because most interactions that people care about happen between objects or forces of roughly similar magnitude. In the example you listed above, you're talking about adding an unimaginable amount of force to the equation. In that respect, it's probably alright to discount the wimpy force of the gravity tractor because it's doing effectively nothing anyway (since the force you specified is probably somewhere in the range of turning the moon into a gigantic rocket and using it to propel the asteroid.
A lot of the more respectable groups started moderation systems back when the spam onslaught started, but they were afterthoughts on a system not designed for them. The problem with moderator systems is that it requires a small handful of trusted moderators, and what do you do when they grow tired of the subject and leave? Electing a small group of moderators (technically, it's rarely an election, they're usually self appointed) always seems to start the slow death of a newsgroup.
It's really a shame because as people have pointed out, the tools built into your average usenet client completely blow away most web forums for features, especially with threading, scoring, tracking, etc... Plus, the Usenet is fast, being a simple text protocol with built-in multicasting you can support communities of millions with virtually no drain on your personal resources. Web forums frequently crash and burn when they start to become popular because the centralized hardware requirements and the fact that you have to run a database means that once you start getting more than a few readers per second you have to start looking at specialized solutions or lose your community to database overload crashes and general slowness. Unfortunately, it is this feature that guarantee that any two bit joker with an internet connection could clobber a group with spam.
As it is so often true in life, we can't have nice things because some jackass will always try to mess it up.
Or smart enough to realize that third party candidates don't count, not in the US at any rate. Plus, the idea that you wouldn't be able to find anything shady at all with the Libertarian or Green party candidate is hilarious.
Yes, clearly we need to elect whoever is currently running that has absolutely no dealings with anybody the least bit shady at any point in their past. I forget which one that is, can you tell me? Elections are always about the lesser of two evils.
What's impressive is that they built something that was pretty close to working. They needed bigger fans and most likely a more powerful motor, but it was generating lift. Of course the real problem with a jetpack like this control. The plans they downloaded from the internet almost certainly neglected this, and had it by some miracle actually worked, it would have still been a deathtrap for anything more than a tethered hover.
But the laws of physics, while they were a boon to computer manufacturers, are a harsh mistress to anybody considering building a portable practical (economical!) jetpack.
Even the one in the article is more like a one person helicopter with a very very sparse cockpit.
That said, I'd be willing to be that if he was able to ramp up production volumes you could buy one of these for a somewhat reasonable price (kit plane prices--still out of the league of Joe Schmoe, but well within the realm of rich people who buy exotic cars and other such toys).
I find it surprising that the concept of "tag this as a section header" is considered foreign to word processor users. That's exactly what pretty much every business user of Word does, at least around here. You start with a document template and then add sections from the template menu. So you start off with header page, fill in any blanks you need, then insert a table of contents (which will be automatically updated), then you say "insert section" and you have your first section. Repeat for all of the sections to make the doucment. Tables and whatnot get automatically tagged and cross referenced with the table reference at the end, etc...
The big caveat is if someone starts messing with the formatting directly it can make a tremendous mess of the document. Sometimes bad enough that you just have to copy the contents out to notepad and recreate the section. Cross references are sometimes handled badly by Word as well. Still, compared to trying to get Tex and the umpteen support packages you need to do anything with it installed and working on everybody's machine (especially metafont support, those packages are nothing but trouble) it's still a timesaver, especially when you're passing the documents around to everybody and make ample use of Word's built-in document tracking features.
Don't get me wrong, Word drives me crazy on a regular basis, but compared to trying to teach my co-workers how to set up and use TeX it is a dream.
Wasn't the summary basically a laundry list of everything that's bad about TeX and LaTeX? To this day one of the things I fear hearing the most is "I installed TeX but it isn't working, can you take a look at it?" Sometimes TeX works right out of the box, other times you're going to spend a pounding your head against the wall and cursing the lack of useful diagnostic output coupled with the ridiculous complexity of the whole package. Even better is when they've customized it so I can't just wipe it out and try installing from scratch.
Also, in my personal opinion, the default font looks terrible, and I hate picking up a technical book and seeing the whole thing typeset in it.
You're pretty close on what the Doom RPG was like. Carmack wrote about it some time ago, and the big point in his article was that although a lot of mobile phone hardware is actually pretty powerful, all of the carriers have ridiculous restrictions that prevent you from using it effectively. Most importantly, the maximum memory size was restricted down to a fraction of what was available on the phone and limited you to a very small palette of sprites/textures.
Worse, Cam caps are likely to have difficulty with dark scenes, which would have made most of The Dark Knight unwatchable period (oh, there's a dark blob moving near another dark blob...).
Lets face it, under Scully Apple was within a hairsbreath of becoming another Windows beige box shop. Computer industry CEOs all seem to want to be Dell, except for Jobs who knows that there is a better way. For another example, look at what happened to SGI when they got a "seasoned" CEO. Sadly, in that case the CEO left the dagger in their back when he left and they've never recovered.
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I'm confused, since when is pro-free-market, anti-union considered liberal? Liberals usually lean towards government regulation and allowing unions around here. They also tend to be against free trade insomuch as the pandering to the base ("we won't let your jobs go overseas!") propaganda goes.
The SSC being shut down still makes me mad. The politicians still consider it a win though, since they shut down that "wasteful government racetrack for microscopic particles".
But I've heard plenty of Koreans scoff at how WoW just hands you everything on a silver platter. Even the epic mount quest can easily be done in a single session. You're not persevering unless it requires a solid week of farming to unlock something. This does tend to come from the Lineage and Lineage II crowd though, who I fear may have warped perceptions.
If doing the small range of things over and over again to advance the game isn't "grind", then I'm not sure what that word means. Granted, all MMOs suffer from that to one degree or another, it's inherent in the system because it takes far longer to create new content than it does to play through it, the only way to extend game play is to make the players repeat the content several times. The difference is in the variety of tasks you can ask them to perform, how long they have to work on one task before they can move on to another, and the amount of effort you put into "distractions", like the storyline, exploring, etc...
To be clear, when I say eastern MMOs, I'm talking about ones created in Korea or Japan. When I say western MMOs, I'm talking about ones created in the US or Canada. I'm sure people in Europe or the Middle East have created some too, but I can't think of any off of the top of my head. Examples of eastern MMOs include Lineage and Fly For Fun. Examples of western MMOs include World of Warcraft and City of Heroes.
In my experiance, that works great until you have to go somewhere with crappy connectivity. Sometimes real life will make a mockery of your best laid plans.
From what I've seen, a bridge between Eastern and Western MMOs is going to be difficult. Eastern MMOs tend to reward hard work and perseverance, whereas western players tend to dislike excessive grind. Even the business models differ, with a lot of eastern MMOs being "free to play" but having a lot of in-game items that need to be purchased with real money. Western MMOs tend to have monthly fees, but discourage or outright ban using actual money in a way that influences gameplay.
If you have customer (or business!) data on a laptop, there is really no reason at all to not have full disk encryption on it. Laptops are stolen all of the time and this is the sort of publicity your company does not need.
Which is why they're designing it to be hooked up to a TV, just like many computers of that era.
Even then you're running into issues of scale. Assuming the the 1.0e-18 is acceleration over a millisecond period, it will take over 317 years to register one thousandth of a percent difference in the velocity. You really have to get out of human scales to get clobbered by lack of precision. That's not to say you should ignore the problem, but in practice the number of times you run into it should be low. Granted, NASA is one of the entities more likely than most to have these sorts of problems, but even then it's not that common.
Perhaps, but the whole reason floating point is "good enough" most of the time is because most interactions that people care about happen between objects or forces of roughly similar magnitude. In the example you listed above, you're talking about adding an unimaginable amount of force to the equation. In that respect, it's probably alright to discount the wimpy force of the gravity tractor because it's doing effectively nothing anyway (since the force you specified is probably somewhere in the range of turning the moon into a gigantic rocket and using it to propel the asteroid.
Isn't the whole point of floating point that you store the exponent separately so you don't run into that problem (at least not as fast)?
Well, he already dropped the fair use openings and closings, so it may be only a matter of time.
A lot of the more respectable groups started moderation systems back when the spam onslaught started, but they were afterthoughts on a system not designed for them. The problem with moderator systems is that it requires a small handful of trusted moderators, and what do you do when they grow tired of the subject and leave? Electing a small group of moderators (technically, it's rarely an election, they're usually self appointed) always seems to start the slow death of a newsgroup.
It's really a shame because as people have pointed out, the tools built into your average usenet client completely blow away most web forums for features, especially with threading, scoring, tracking, etc... Plus, the Usenet is fast, being a simple text protocol with built-in multicasting you can support communities of millions with virtually no drain on your personal resources. Web forums frequently crash and burn when they start to become popular because the centralized hardware requirements and the fact that you have to run a database means that once you start getting more than a few readers per second you have to start looking at specialized solutions or lose your community to database overload crashes and general slowness. Unfortunately, it is this feature that guarantee that any two bit joker with an internet connection could clobber a group with spam.
As it is so often true in life, we can't have nice things because some jackass will always try to mess it up.
Or smart enough to realize that third party candidates don't count, not in the US at any rate. Plus, the idea that you wouldn't be able to find anything shady at all with the Libertarian or Green party candidate is hilarious.
Yes, clearly we need to elect whoever is currently running that has absolutely no dealings with anybody the least bit shady at any point in their past. I forget which one that is, can you tell me? Elections are always about the lesser of two evils.
I think you have to get above the ground effect to not be considered a hovercraft.
What's impressive is that they built something that was pretty close to working. They needed bigger fans and most likely a more powerful motor, but it was generating lift. Of course the real problem with a jetpack like this control. The plans they downloaded from the internet almost certainly neglected this, and had it by some miracle actually worked, it would have still been a deathtrap for anything more than a tethered hover.
But the laws of physics, while they were a boon to computer manufacturers, are a harsh mistress to anybody considering building a portable practical (economical!) jetpack.
Even the one in the article is more like a one person helicopter with a very very sparse cockpit.
That said, I'd be willing to be that if he was able to ramp up production volumes you could buy one of these for a somewhat reasonable price (kit plane prices--still out of the league of Joe Schmoe, but well within the realm of rich people who buy exotic cars and other such toys).
The link in the summary is 404 already.
I find it surprising that the concept of "tag this as a section header" is considered foreign to word processor users. That's exactly what pretty much every business user of Word does, at least around here. You start with a document template and then add sections from the template menu. So you start off with header page, fill in any blanks you need, then insert a table of contents (which will be automatically updated), then you say "insert section" and you have your first section. Repeat for all of the sections to make the doucment. Tables and whatnot get automatically tagged and cross referenced with the table reference at the end, etc...
The big caveat is if someone starts messing with the formatting directly it can make a tremendous mess of the document. Sometimes bad enough that you just have to copy the contents out to notepad and recreate the section. Cross references are sometimes handled badly by Word as well. Still, compared to trying to get Tex and the umpteen support packages you need to do anything with it installed and working on everybody's machine (especially metafont support, those packages are nothing but trouble) it's still a timesaver, especially when you're passing the documents around to everybody and make ample use of Word's built-in document tracking features.
Don't get me wrong, Word drives me crazy on a regular basis, but compared to trying to teach my co-workers how to set up and use TeX it is a dream.
Wasn't the summary basically a laundry list of everything that's bad about TeX and LaTeX? To this day one of the things I fear hearing the most is "I installed TeX but it isn't working, can you take a look at it?" Sometimes TeX works right out of the box, other times you're going to spend a pounding your head against the wall and cursing the lack of useful diagnostic output coupled with the ridiculous complexity of the whole package. Even better is when they've customized it so I can't just wipe it out and try installing from scratch.
Also, in my personal opinion, the default font looks terrible, and I hate picking up a technical book and seeing the whole thing typeset in it.
Objective C is closer to C than C++ is. Porting the code over wouldn't be that bad.
You're pretty close on what the Doom RPG was like. Carmack wrote about it some time ago, and the big point in his article was that although a lot of mobile phone hardware is actually pretty powerful, all of the carriers have ridiculous restrictions that prevent you from using it effectively. Most importantly, the maximum memory size was restricted down to a fraction of what was available on the phone and limited you to a very small palette of sprites/textures.
Worse, Cam caps are likely to have difficulty with dark scenes, which would have made most of The Dark Knight unwatchable period (oh, there's a dark blob moving near another dark blob...).
Lets face it, under Scully Apple was within a hairsbreath of becoming another Windows beige box shop. Computer industry CEOs all seem to want to be Dell, except for Jobs who knows that there is a better way. For another example, look at what happened to SGI when they got a "seasoned" CEO. Sadly, in that case the CEO left the dagger in their back when he left and they've never recovered.