Actually it *is* linked into the Foundation series. In one novel of the series (I forget which one), the temporal guys (whatever they were called) are mentioned as a distant rumour in a throwaway paragraph. I have a feeling Asimov did it just too say that *everything* is linked together.
I've always wondered about this too. One nuke might fragment the asteroid. What would a few thousand do?
Seriously, if we fire a decent fraction of the US and Russia's nuclear complement at the asteroid and we don't completely vaporise that sucker, it just means we need bigger nukes;-)
Optic fibre might be fine but what about RAM? I take it that the increase in high energy particles hitting us will randomly flip a few bits? Pretty easily fixed with redundancy but still bad.
Yes, but we have an atmosphere to provide additional protection. How much protection it provides? I don't know. Our satellites OTOH will be truly out in the open.
On the plus side equatorial auroras should be cool. Can any people better informed confirm if this will happen?
alternatively release a fake "wormcode patch" which poisons nodes after they pass it on. Such an anti-virus-virus would take the network down in less than 15 seconds.
What's to stop the code from using crypto to sign the patches? Worms have the public key, author has the private key. Simple and reasonably bullet proof.
there is a glass window pane, it has slowly melted
into a warbled surface, so the light passing through
it and coming into my room is no longer uniform.
Glass doesn't flow. Old glass is crap because it was crap when they made it. Their manufacturing techniques weren't as good as ours.
Many here have spoken of the "insane" "horrendous" "crazy" amounts of money spent on IIS. How many think that this money was spent *mostly* to make sure that no one died?
Wow! I knew IIS had its bugs but I never thought that some of those bugs were life threatening! I'm also a bit worried that you think they have only *mostly* eliminated them.
Maybe you should have a look at some of the embedded subsets of C++. For example, drivers for Mac OS X are written in a subset that removes most of the stuff you mentioned. IIRC, all that is left is single inheritance and member functions. Constructors and destructors are also left out. new just allocates. You then have to call init() on the method to do the setting up. This is in line with Objective-C, and it isn't so bad. It reduces some of the complexity too.
You were modded funny but you are completely correct.
Chemistry is just the physics of electron shells (among other things). Biology is just the chemistry of organic molecules (at its heart anyway). Psychology is just.. well you get the picture. Physics is about finding the fundamental theories of the universe. Everything is physics by definition.
Of course, sometimes the link between physics and a higher level abstraction is poorly understood. For example, human behaviour is just the firing of neurons and so should be explainable by physics but we aren't even close yet.
I'm not suggesting that we get rid of these higher level sciences. Anyone who's programmed in assembler will realise that abstractions are important.
Therefore the OS didn't have to page out all the memory at the context switch tick and they could afford to tick more often, because the costs were lower.
Wow. Are you saying that linux pages out the running process at every context switch? I think I might have found an explanation for X's choppiness.
You're happy with 8 extra GP registers?! The PPC has 32 and the Crusoe (IIRC) has 64. Think ahead people. Your statement could be restated as "16 registers should be enough for anyone". I want to see an ISA with 256 GP registers, like some VLIW ISAs have.
Disclaimer: I know nothing about the x86 architecture. I'm more a PPC guy. For the x86 I'm relying on what others have posted (dangerous, I know).
Apes are certainly physiologically equipped to build their own society. They have the digits to construct things, they have the basic insights into using tools and they have very rudimentary language capabilities.
Many animals will make tools to help them get food. This was once thought to be the domain of humans only. What if apes keep inventing tools, but because an ape can only discover a new tool by inventing it or mimicking another ape (due to the lack of sophisticated language), the knowledge doesn't spread far and eventually dies out. There is no evidence to suggest that other primates in the past didn't invent the spear or the bow and arrow. Are you really so sure that you would have invented the spear independently if you hadn't heard about it?
Like I said, I don't believe that they are our intellectual equals. I merely said that I think we're underestimating them.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually it *is* linked into the Foundation series. In one novel of the series (I forget which one), the temporal guys (whatever they were called) are mentioned as a distant rumour in a throwaway paragraph. I have a feeling Asimov did it just too say that *everything* is linked together.
Seriously, if we fire a decent fraction of the US and Russia's nuclear complement at the asteroid and we don't completely vaporise that sucker, it just means we need bigger nukes ;-)
*sigh*
Wow! 2.5 seconds a cycle! Can it play mp3s?
Encrypted disk images are your friend.
My vote's for fastmail too (postinbox is one of their secondary domain names).
Optic fibre might be fine but what about RAM? I take it that the increase in high energy particles hitting us will randomly flip a few bits? Pretty easily fixed with redundancy but still bad.
On the plus side equatorial auroras should be cool. Can any people better informed confirm if this will happen?
Apple's OpenFirmware also uses forth. Hold down Command+Option+o+f at startup and you are thrown into a Forth shell. How's that for a BIOS?
What's to stop the code from using crypto to sign the patches? Worms have the public key, author has the private key. Simple and reasonably bullet proof.
Glass doesn't flow. Old glass is crap because it was crap when they made it. Their manufacturing techniques weren't as good as ours.
Here a link.
Wow! I knew IIS had its bugs but I never thought that some of those bugs were life threatening! I'm also a bit worried that you think they have only *mostly* eliminated them.
Maybe you should have a look at some of the embedded subsets of C++. For example, drivers for Mac OS X are written in a subset that removes most of the stuff you mentioned. IIRC, all that is left is single inheritance and member functions. Constructors and destructors are also left out. new just allocates. You then have to call init() on the method to do the setting up. This is in line with Objective-C, and it isn't so bad. It reduces some of the complexity too.
The early macs didn't have a PSU fan. They got real hot too ;)
Chemistry is just the physics of electron shells (among other things). Biology is just the chemistry of organic molecules (at its heart anyway). Psychology is just.. well you get the picture. Physics is about finding the fundamental theories of the universe. Everything is physics by definition.
Of course, sometimes the link between physics and a higher level abstraction is poorly understood. For example, human behaviour is just the firing of neurons and so should be explainable by physics but we aren't even close yet.
I'm not suggesting that we get rid of these higher level sciences. Anyone who's programmed in assembler will realise that abstractions are important.
Wow. Are you saying that linux pages out the running process at every context switch? I think I might have found an explanation for X's choppiness.
Just kidding, I really like the idea of this browser.
What did you think PROM stood for?
Exactly! To the media we're probably considered industry experts and they will probably believe whatever rumor we tell them.
Disclaimer: I know nothing about the x86 architecture. I'm more a PPC guy. For the x86 I'm relying on what others have posted (dangerous, I know).
Yeah, or you could just buy a big bottle of methanol.
You seem to not understand the concept of a volunteer. They can work on whatever project they like.
If you read the post above you, you'll see that he is quite correct, even if he didn't explain it very well.
doubleplusungood is one word.
Many animals will make tools to help them get food. This was once thought to be the domain of humans only. What if apes keep inventing tools, but because an ape can only discover a new tool by inventing it or mimicking another ape (due to the lack of sophisticated language), the knowledge doesn't spread far and eventually dies out. There is no evidence to suggest that other primates in the past didn't invent the spear or the bow and arrow. Are you really so sure that you would have invented the spear independently if you hadn't heard about it?
Like I said, I don't believe that they are our intellectual equals. I merely said that I think we're underestimating them.