if anything, your argument seems to most support a communist ideal where we work for the pleasure of doing so, and need no recompense so long as we aren't dying of poverty
You got that from my post? Time to lay off whatever you're smoking, before posting on Slashdot?
"spit out a ton of speed really quickly and then coast your way to orbit" approach really sucks
A "nice slow steady boost" will burn an enormous amount of fuel.
Let's say your rocket weighs 1,000lb. If you provide = 1000lb of thrust your rocket will just sit there. If you provide 1001lb of thrust it'll start to accelerate every so slowly... if you provide 1002lb of thrust you'll accelerate twice as fast, but only burn ~0.1% more energy.
You'll go faster (for a given thrust) as you burn up fuel and thus shed weight, but at any weight, the higher the thrust, the smaller the percentage of energy you spend just overcoming gravity, and the more you spend accelerating the vehicle.
And don't forget, that if you got above the atmosphere "slow and steady"... if you're under orbit velocity, you're going to fall right down unless you plan on burning fuel forever.
I don't understand the people railing against Facebook-based or other games because of the so-called issue of paying real money for in-game credits. People put in real quarters to play a video games at the arcade, they subscribe to World of Warcraft and other MMORGs.
You're not paying for credits, you're paying for entertainment provided by the game.
I use thunderbird with IMAP and it works fine, so it might be time to give it another shot. The server side software does matter though... I used to have my mail on Godaddy's e-mail service and that sucked. For instance, if you tried to move more than 500 e-mails at once it would crap out (for example if you're reorganizing stuff and want to move stuff over somewhere)
I now run my own dovecot server and it works great.
install a firefox plugin that syncs bookmarks
I'd be more interested in syncing the smart-bar/history/saved form fields than the bookmarks,
Check out Firefox sync. It syncs everything, bookmarks/smart-bar/history/saved passwords etc. You can even see "tabs from other computers" in the history menu which is pretty handy. It does store stuff on Mozilla's servers but it encrypts it locally before uploading it. I also believe (but I'm not 100% certain) you have the option to use your own server
Personally excessive fade effects annoy me because I spend a lot of time using tools like vnc, remote desktop, citrix ica clients, etc.
I'm curious about why you do that on a regular basis. I used to ssh to my machine at home to access stuff, but ultimately found it more efficient to move my e-mail over to an IMAP server, install a firefox plugin that syncs bookmarks, and sftp or sshfs when I need to access files. The only time I really need to access stuff through a remote desktop is to do admin tasks on a windows machine.
A somewhat amusing juxtaposition of a line from this story:
The Pirate Bay, which 'offers a range of bottoms to suit every need, including midget and donkey bottoms for anybody having a really slow afternoon – remains blissfully undisturbed.'
against the other just a couple of slots down on the front page article
"Torrent-tracking site The Pirate Bay is currently unavailable as reports come in of co-ordinated police raids against file sharers across Europe.
You fail at reading comprehension in at least two ways.
Firstly, if you'd read the very first line of the summary (clearly reading the entire summary, or the actual article would be too much to expect here) you'd know it's about Google being investigated because the companies that complained alleged that that is what Google did. It's not because of what they "could" do but because of what they (allegedly) actually did.
Secondly, if you'd read the very first line of my comment you're responding to, you'd know even that is not especially relevant because I wasn't saying Google is guilty of anything, just that the GP's assertion that Google can in no way be considered a monopoly is false.
That's assuming they were totally blatant and obvious about it... like it Oracle suddenly disappeared from search results after they filed their suit. But if they really chose to use their search market to, say, dominate the mobile market there are so many subtle ways of doing it. Whenever someone searched for the iPhone, stories about the antenna problems could get higher rankings than their organic ranking would dictate. Stories praising the latest Android-based "iphone-killer" could float a closer to the top.
If they decided to abuse their power, Google could certainly provide an unfair nudge in directions they wanted and it would be extremely hard to gauge that from the outside, especially if they only did it with a very small number of carefully selected areas.
I don't believe they would do such a thing because I do believe the founders do want to do the right thing and not mess with their core product. If Brin and Page decided to leave Google though and leave the company in charge of some random schmo, who knows.
I'm not arguing in favor of this investigation and don't believe the allegations, but you're wrong about the monopoly thing. A monopoly doesn't have to be complete, nor does there have to be a lock-in in order to fall afoul of anti-trust law. Standard Oil was not the only oil company, and had minor players. People were always free to buy from them. Windows was not the only operating system, you could always use Linux or buy a Mac.
Standard Oil used its dominant position to stifle its competition. Microsoft used its dominant market share in Windows to snuff out Netscape. I don't think anyone can doubt that Google could decimate a web-based business by demoting them in search rankings.
The fine structure constant is given as being equal to "e^2/hc", so if the FSC is not a constant then one (or more) of the other values must also be a variable.
That does not follow. I don't know enough about the fine-structure constant to talk about the specifics here, but another possibility is that the theory (and equations) where the constant is used is incorrect and there should be some other expression there, not a constant.
I'm not disputing that it could still be a very significant result, but it doesn't necessarily follow that e, h or c are variable.
That's a strange choice of phrase considering you're knocking the one area of the country where under 25% of people own cars, compared to 92% nationwide.
According to the Passmark benchmark, a 3.20 GHz scores 524, compared to 10221 for a 3.20 GHz Core i7 970 six-core CPU. That works out to 3.14 times faster per core than the Pentium 4. While short of 4-5, the GP is not as far off the mark as your ridicule would suggest.
I actually think YOU (and the cretin who modded you insightful) fail.
Launching rockets into space makes a pretty huge mess of the environment too. Liquid fuels like liquid hydrogen+liquid oxygen require vast amounts of energy to produce, liquefy and store.
Then there's the price of getting to space. That's about $10,000/lb to get to geostationary orbit. A 40' standard intermodal shipping container weighs about 9,000lb. You might say once could build it out of a lighter material, but you also need to get it from GTO to the asteroids and back, make a controlled descent back to earth etc. So let's just keep things simple and assume it's a magical shipping container that will fly out to the asteroid belt and back and return to earth safely. You've spent $90M launching this into space.
Now, let's assume that there are asteroids with pure titanium (density 4.5g/cm^3) sitting on the asteroid around just waiting to be loaded into the magical shipping container and you fill it completely to it's 75.3m^3 capacity, and bring it back to earth. Titanium is currently about $11/lb, but let's call it $20/lb. You've brought back about $15M worth of titanium back to earth.
Even in this amazingly slanted scenario the cost of a space launch would have to fall by 83% just to break even.
If the space elevator became reality that might change the economics drastically, but that's not really relevant here because that's not likely to happen in the "near-term".
Firstly, your retort isn't relevant because it's the editor's JOB to curate the submissions, not just to pick a few a day and post them verbatim. If all they wanted to do was pick the top few stories of the day, a simple voting system like digg or reddit would do that more efficiently.
Secondly, if you'd bothered to look at the GP's user page, you'd see that he/she has submitted several stories and had many of them accepted.
Slashdot Mirror
if anything, your argument seems to most support a communist ideal where we work for the pleasure of doing so, and need no recompense so long as we aren't dying of poverty
You got that from my post? Time to lay off whatever you're smoking, before posting on Slashdot?
Uh...I do. The vast majority of people live paycheck to paycheck and are just trying to break even.
That's the situation they're in, not their goal. The goal is to make enough to live a comfortable life with lots of things they want but don't need.
People don't go into business just to "make their money back" any more than you work your job to make just enough to pay your rent and feed yourself.
"spit out a ton of speed really quickly and then coast your way to orbit" approach really sucks
A "nice slow steady boost" will burn an enormous amount of fuel.
Let's say your rocket weighs 1,000lb. If you provide = 1000lb of thrust your rocket will just sit there. If you provide 1001lb of thrust it'll start to accelerate every so slowly... if you provide 1002lb of thrust you'll accelerate twice as fast, but only burn ~0.1% more energy.
You'll go faster (for a given thrust) as you burn up fuel and thus shed weight, but at any weight, the higher the thrust, the smaller the percentage of energy you spend just overcoming gravity, and the more you spend accelerating the vehicle.
And don't forget, that if you got above the atmosphere "slow and steady"... if you're under orbit velocity, you're going to fall right down unless you plan on burning fuel forever.
It's not just about searching online for the question... you also need to be able to prevent people from asking their friends for help
These "games" are not what I would consider actual games,
Not everybody likes every game. The fact is millions of people play them.
I don't understand the people railing against Facebook-based or other games because of the so-called issue of paying real money for in-game credits. People put in real quarters to play a video games at the arcade, they subscribe to World of Warcraft and other MMORGs.
You're not paying for credits, you're paying for entertainment provided by the game.
I use thunderbird with IMAP and it works fine, so it might be time to give it another shot. The server side software does matter though... I used to have my mail on Godaddy's e-mail service and that sucked. For instance, if you tried to move more than 500 e-mails at once it would crap out (for example if you're reorganizing stuff and want to move stuff over somewhere)
I now run my own dovecot server and it works great.
install a firefox plugin that syncs bookmarks
I'd be more interested in syncing the smart-bar/history/saved form fields than the bookmarks,
Check out Firefox sync. It syncs everything, bookmarks/smart-bar/history/saved passwords etc. You can even see "tabs from other computers" in the history menu which is pretty handy. It does store stuff on Mozilla's servers but it encrypts it locally before uploading it. I also believe (but I'm not 100% certain) you have the option to use your own server
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/sync/
Personally excessive fade effects annoy me because I spend a lot of time using tools like vnc, remote desktop, citrix ica clients, etc.
I'm curious about why you do that on a regular basis. I used to ssh to my machine at home to access stuff, but ultimately found it more efficient to move my e-mail over to an IMAP server, install a firefox plugin that syncs bookmarks, and sftp or sshfs when I need to access files. The only time I really need to access stuff through a remote desktop is to do admin tasks on a windows machine.
So I'm wondering what your use case is.
What is /. coming to?
Adulthood?
A somewhat amusing juxtaposition of a line from this story:
The Pirate Bay, which 'offers a range of bottoms to suit every need, including midget and donkey bottoms for anybody having a really slow afternoon – remains blissfully undisturbed.'
against the other just a couple of slots down on the front page article
"Torrent-tracking site The Pirate Bay is currently unavailable as reports come in of co-ordinated police raids against file sharers across Europe.
You fail at reading comprehension in at least two ways.
Firstly, if you'd read the very first line of the summary (clearly reading the entire summary, or the actual article would be too much to expect here) you'd know it's about Google being investigated because the companies that complained alleged that that is what Google did. It's not because of what they "could" do but because of what they (allegedly) actually did.
Secondly, if you'd read the very first line of my comment you're responding to, you'd know even that is not especially relevant because I wasn't saying Google is guilty of anything, just that the GP's assertion that Google can in no way be considered a monopoly is false.
Thanks for playing.
How about you read the very first thing I said my my comment
That's assuming they were totally blatant and obvious about it... like it Oracle suddenly disappeared from search results after they filed their suit. But if they really chose to use their search market to, say, dominate the mobile market there are so many subtle ways of doing it. Whenever someone searched for the iPhone, stories about the antenna problems could get higher rankings than their organic ranking would dictate. Stories praising the latest Android-based "iphone-killer" could float a closer to the top.
If they decided to abuse their power, Google could certainly provide an unfair nudge in directions they wanted and it would be extremely hard to gauge that from the outside, especially if they only did it with a very small number of carefully selected areas.
I don't believe they would do such a thing because I do believe the founders do want to do the right thing and not mess with their core product. If Brin and Page decided to leave Google though and leave the company in charge of some random schmo, who knows.
I'm not arguing in favor of this investigation and don't believe the allegations, but you're wrong about the monopoly thing. A monopoly doesn't have to be complete, nor does there have to be a lock-in in order to fall afoul of anti-trust law. Standard Oil was not the only oil company, and had minor players. People were always free to buy from them. Windows was not the only operating system, you could always use Linux or buy a Mac.
Standard Oil used its dominant position to stifle its competition. Microsoft used its dominant market share in Windows to snuff out Netscape. I don't think anyone can doubt that Google could decimate a web-based business by demoting them in search rankings.
The fine structure constant is given as being equal to "e^2/hc", so if the FSC is not a constant then one (or more) of the other values must also be a variable.
That does not follow. I don't know enough about the fine-structure constant to talk about the specifics here, but another possibility is that the theory (and equations) where the constant is used is incorrect and there should be some other expression there, not a constant.
I'm not disputing that it could still be a very significant result, but it doesn't necessarily follow that e, h or c are variable.
When people download porn without paying for it it ultimately hurts the working stiffs...
douche-bag Manhattanite driving a Range Rover
That's a strange choice of phrase considering you're knocking the one area of the country where under 25% of people own cars, compared to 92% nationwide.
According to the Passmark benchmark, a 3.20 GHz scores 524, compared to 10221 for a 3.20 GHz Core i7 970 six-core CPU. That works out to 3.14 times faster per core than the Pentium 4. While short of 4-5, the GP is not as far off the mark as your ridicule would suggest.
I actually think YOU (and the cretin who modded you insightful) fail.
I don't know about the same room, but in the same datacenter, certainly.
Yes, if it was for use in space, that could be worth it. That's not what they're talking about here though.
Launching rockets into space makes a pretty huge mess of the environment too. Liquid fuels like liquid hydrogen+liquid oxygen require vast amounts of energy to produce, liquefy and store.
Then there's the price of getting to space. That's about $10,000/lb to get to geostationary orbit. A 40' standard intermodal shipping container weighs about 9,000lb. You might say once could build it out of a lighter material, but you also need to get it from GTO to the asteroids and back, make a controlled descent back to earth etc. So let's just keep things simple and assume it's a magical shipping container that will fly out to the asteroid belt and back and return to earth safely. You've spent $90M launching this into space.
Now, let's assume that there are asteroids with pure titanium (density 4.5g/cm^3) sitting on the asteroid around just waiting to be loaded into the magical shipping container and you fill it completely to it's 75.3m^3 capacity, and bring it back to earth. Titanium is currently about $11/lb, but let's call it $20/lb. You've brought back about $15M worth of titanium back to earth.
Even in this amazingly slanted scenario the cost of a space launch would have to fall by 83% just to break even.
If the space elevator became reality that might change the economics drastically, but that's not really relevant here because that's not likely to happen in the "near-term".
The Apollo missions were never intended to be commercially viable. Just a 20 billion dollar fuck you to the USSR.
Firstly, your retort isn't relevant because it's the editor's JOB to curate the submissions, not just to pick a few a day and post them verbatim. If all they wanted to do was pick the top few stories of the day, a simple voting system like digg or reddit would do that more efficiently.
Secondly, if you'd bothered to look at the GP's user page, you'd see that he/she has submitted several stories and had many of them accepted.
I'm very sorry the government taxes their tips, that's fucked up
Why should tips be any different from other forms of income?