The long system is hardly used any place outside of Europe. So, this is one of the strange cases where the U.S. and the U.K. use the same system, and it's the system used by the majority of the world. In this case, it is France/Italy/Germany/Spain/Portugal/Netherlends that insist on using their own system.
In Norway, 10^9 is kalled a "milliard", 10^12 is a billion, and 10^18 is a trillion. While "milliard" is in common use, to avoid confusion most people use "1000 milliards" in place of billion. Trillion is strangely enough common, even though the danger of confusion is just as bad as with billion. I've also seen 10^x used regularly even in normal newspaper articles.
Actually, it sounds more like an idea Kenton Varda had:)
Jokes aside,
Do we have lasers that won't diverge more than a meter over a few gigameters of distance?
No, we don't. I couldn't find numbers, but as you'd probably need lenses to produce a collimated beam it'd be extremely difficult to manufacture them with enough precision. Even a meter of divergence would be far to wide to generate enough heat to cause a burst of ejected material. According to the researchers in The Fine Article you'll want to get those lasers in as close as possible.
Bla blah about the size of the state of Texas. Texas, asshole. Blah blah crayons.
Unless I'm extremely misinformed, Texas is a wee bit bigger than an estimated 10 km (about 6 miles). While still big enough to be a huge problem, Texas-sized it wasn't.
While everyone is talking about the moon, I once read about a creationist explanation about it and I was wondering how does the recession compare? Is the math correct? That the moon would be in the Roche limit in only 1.3 GA?
http://creation.com/the-moons-recession-and-age
I'll accept your plea that you're not trolling. The math (apparently from Deyoung 1990) is not incorrect, but it's meaningless as it's based on the wrong assumption that tidal dissipation and deformation is constant over time, which has been refuted by strong paleontological evidence. The recession rate of the moon has in fact increased over time. Even if the article you're linking to were not flawed to the extent that it ignores research from the last 35+ years, the argument "Science seems to not agree on this, therefore God" is also obviously false.
Sorry I am not trolling, I am just curious about the math presented in that article. Is that formula correct? or are there any mistakes?
Depends on how you define "mistakes". Deyoung obviously has an agenda, and knew fully well that he was wrong when he wrote his article. It was no mistake, but it is deliberately misleading. It saddens me when Creationists try to invalidate large bodies of scientific evidence to justify their beliefs in a particular creation myth.
For a summary of why the science is not wrong either, this article seems to sum it up nicely. Look for the headings "The Paleontological Evidence" and "The Creationist Arguments".
You're not impressing anyone here with your made up stories of superhuman feats of strength.
Braggart.
My brother claims that an American friend of his managed to hold on to the steering wheel when the airbag deployed during regular highway driving, and that he stopped the car without incident due to this. This guy is a baseball hitter, he's built like a barrel and immensely strong. I've seen pictures of his continuous bruise which went from each hand, all the way up his arms and across his chest, but I'm still not sure I believe that it's even possible if you're caught unaware:)
Nevermind, it sounds like they've spent $200 million on this system since its inception and the site goes down due to traffic every year... that's some extreme incompetence at work.
This is a huge system which handles a lot more than peoples' tax returns, it's basically *the* portal for most of your interaction with the government. It replaces a lot of physical paper form exchange. It has saved government, corporate users and regular Joes a large amount of time, and is regarded as a success by most standards. As I see it it doesn't really make sense to build infrastructure to handle the one day in the year you will see tens of times the normal traffic, some system of rolling login slots would be sufficient. Of course, the real WTF was that poor Kenneth (36) had his financial details laid out for everyone to see due to a dirty cache, that's incredibly incompetent, I guess that some employee will not get a bonus this year...
Really they need a staggered ticket system to distribute the load over time. Issue each citizen a ticket that indicates a period when they can log in to check data, both a soonest and latest date (stragglers not tolerated). This is no different than physical scenarios where people are grouped by first letter of last name, etc. in a crowded office and then each group served sequentially to lighten the load.
Yes, they could have implemented rotating login slots based on some random digit from our SSNs, say 10 minutes for each group. "Due to heavy traffic we must limit login based on <whatever>, your next login can be made between 15:00 and 15:10". The Government is not obliged to get this information to you before you receive your printed report, and your waiting period would be at most 90 minutes anyway.
Alternatively they could maybe just display the relevant numbers in a simple table immediately after login, as it is you must find your tax report and download it as a PDF. This would also lighten the load. Most people are initially just anxious to see if they owe money or get a payback. Yours truly will, for instance, get a payout of about $2691 mainly due to deduction of interest paid on my mortgage, my curiosity that day was just to see that number. I had calculated the approximate amount in advance, but - yay:)
Someone made a pretty funny spoof site(half decent google translation). The translation will give you the gist of it if you can't read Norwegian. I especially like "Login as Kenneth (does not require password)". They missed the chance to misspell Buypass (an authentication service) as Bypass, though:)
In this case, in order to get random numbers that are more random, I suggest that you generate a large number of them, say 10,000, and then take their average. </sarcasm>
Even easier, I just rolled a die. The result was 4, guaranteed to be random. Feel free to use this result as you like.
But, for any data stored in a computer, it's generally a totally useless format, since you can't sort on it. unless you actually have it broken into fields.
Agreed, and as far as "fields" goes for days/months/whatever, that way madness lies. For storage/sorting you use whatever time types your DB/programming languages use internally, alternatively ISO 8601 for text storage (as you mention, sort of). For validation/period calculation you use/abuse the Julian date functions (astronomical, not the ordinal day). For presentation and input you use internationalisation. If you're treating dates and times as strings at any point, you're very likely Doing It Wrong (TM).
This should be beaten into every programmer's head in all programming intro courses.
No, keep doing this until we can buy directly from the authors all the time. There isn't much need for a middleman with digital goods.
I should mention that I work as a tech guy at an academic publishing company, but I write this post as a reader, albeit with a better than average insight in the actual creation process of a book.
There is a large amount of vanity-published ebooks available for free or next to nothing (but not marketed, see below). Go on, drink your fill of awkward language and sentences, grammar/spelling errors, story arcs that doesn't quite work, descriptions and whole chapters which are superfluous, plot inconsistencies, etc etc. All presented in epubs very badly converted from Word with no cover or table of contents. Then, come back and tell us again that publishers are worthless with their editors, copyeditors, proofreaders, graphic artists and layout professionals who all work together as a team. Or, you could ask published authors if they believe that their publisher added any value to their books (or just read some prefaces).
As an author, yes, you can hire all those people yourself if you have enough capital. Seriously, it's an alternative you could look into, if you're good and have a fair bit of luck it could work out for you. No, you or your friends can't do it, no matter how well you did in $language class. If you don't already have an established name, you'll probably need marketing as well, which is nicely substantiated by the fact that you (parent post) obviously haven't seen very many actual results of self-publishing.
I've actually read quite a few of those, mostly science fiction novelas and short stories. The saddest thing is when what could have been a good story is buried beneath heaps of flaws, marring the experience and diminishing the author's initial chance of making it big.
I'm not saying that what you describe couldn't be achieved if we had large pools of good, reliable and readily available freelancers. This will probably happen one day, but we're not there yet, and until then we need publishers for QA. Publishers can and do use freelancers if necessary, but even for them it's quite hard to find good ones.
If an author can't/won't use a publisher, that's fine, but he NEEDS to get professional assistance if he's serious about his work.
Are you so insanely literal that you cannot see that legends and myths sometimes DO contain a grain of truth at their cores?
No, where do I say that? There are lots of flood traditions around the world, most of them in areas where people see smaller floods regularly. The Egyptians you mention, for instance, observe yearly flooding of the Nile. I'm not sure why I bother, but: *You* mentioned Noah's Flood (not flood myths in general), and *you* linked to a pseudoscientific (at best) explanation for it in the same post. One does not need impacts to explain where flood myths originate. One does, however, need a pretty dramatic and implausible event to explain the Deluge.
My gripe is with people who seek to prove that their favourite myth is not a myth by basically trying to invalidate all other research in the fields, in a way attacking and undermining science itself. It's just as bad as any other creationist "science". Note that I infer that it is such from other sources than the group itself. They do not state it directly, but they are widely quoted on creationist websites as a defence of a literal interpretation of the Bible, in addition to everything I mentioned in my earlier post..
"Noah's Flood" was "world-wide" only from the perspective of a very narrow slice of the "world"
Oh, and I got the duration of the mythical Deluge wrong. It apparently lasted for closer to a year, the forty days I mentioned where just somewhat rainy. As if anyone cares:)
William Hope Hodgson's "The Night Land" deserves a read. Inspiration for Lovecraft, among others.
While the setting is fascinating, the language and several other literary atrocities pretty much destroyed it for me. Until someone does a rewrite (it's in PD) I frankly can't recommend it. Lovecraft himself said that it "...is seriously marred by painful verboseness, repetitiousness, artificial and nauseously sticky romantic sentimentality, and an attempt at archaic language even more grotesque and absurd than that in Glen Carrig". I actually went so far as to search and replace the worst stylistic horrors in my ebook version in order to even get through it. The language is not even "real" archaic english, it's mostly just contrivances of Hodgson's.
I can, however, heartily recommend "The House on the Borderland":)
Sure. An inundation of the entire world for forty days and forty nights is no problem, all you need is a big enough impact. I take it this Holocene Impact Working Group has a religious agenda?
They don't actually come out and say it (as far as I can tell), but they have a very specific time estimate (2800-3000 BCE) with no actual dating procedures performed, and they admit that their hypothesis flies in the face of most relevant research ("The scientific community, I wouldn't expect 99.9 per cent of it to agree with us"). What's more, their research is generally clutching at straws and is easily repudiated by experts in the relevant fields. All this makes it reek of religious revisionism of science, itself disguised as science.
Why can't religious nutjobs just leave science alone?
The only problem with e-books and e-readers is that they're clearly not made by readers.
Books, the good ones at least and most of the bad ones too, pay attention to typography. Paragraph-optimized justification, hyphenation, hanging punctuation, ligatures, etc. All these little things that you take for granted with a dead-tree book, but without them it's a significantly poorer experience.
I read a lot, and I make epubs for a publishing company. I've also made a lot of paper books in my time with the company, I've lost count by now, but more than a hundred. I unfortunately pay far too much attention to layout when reading, it's a curse of the trade.
When making epubs, however, you're more or less at the mercy of whichever renderer the readers are using. For a wide marked you have to aim for basic readability on the largest number of screens, which means the lowest common denominator. PDFs just doesn't work for most readers. You also run into interesting problems like "which font is legal for distribution, has the glyphs we need, is readable on small size screens (backlit or not, with different colours), and oh, is not *too* ugly".
What's good about ebooks, though, is that you can change the font, size and spacing if you want. You can usually get an acceptable result, though it'll never be as good as a paper book where the typesetter has only one target format. If you don't like the font of your a paper book, you're stuck with it.
Re:That's why I like the basic Kindle
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The eBook Backlash
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· Score: 1
I have both a Sony PRS-505, and an iPad. I use both, for different types of reading. The Sony is wonderful for novels and any other book that reads linearly and requires little backtracking/browsing. I use the iPad for reference, technical, and text books. The resolution and super fast refresh are much better for non-linear reading, studying, etc. That said, because I tend to have the iPad with me anyway, I do quite a bit of novel reading as well. I far prefer the reading experience on the Sony, but you're more likely to read on a device that you have with you, and if I have only the option of bringing one, I'll bring the device that is more flexible.
All of that said, try to read an iPad in the sun, then pull out a Kindle... ++Kindle
We recently got an iPad 2 for testing purposes at work (publishing company). I brought it when visiting family at Christmas, and when I found myself without a reading light in the improvised bedroom, I started reading my current book on the iPad... and soon found out that it worked better when used as a nightlight for my E-Ink reader:)
No. This isn't about raw bandwidth. This is also about the supporting infrastructure.
It makes no sense to try to support edge use cases. It also makes no sense to let a handful of users take down service because some person wanted to run a torrent tracker.
Yes there's an oversell, but no, it's not as bad as you think.
That is completely irrelevant. Selling a service you know you won't provide is fraud. I live in a country with strong customer protection laws, the first ISP to try to pull the "secret limits" shit that providers do elsewhere would likely get slapped down. Published limits are the norm on mobile connections, and practically do not exist on household broadband.
ISPs have extremely good data about bandwidth usage distribution among customers, and can predict with a high degree of precision what kind of usage a particular service will see. If you, as an ISP, can't provide your customers with the bandwidth you promise, don't sell it. Put a non-secret limit on a cheap connection, and sell a premium service which supports 500GB/month or whatever. Or accept that a percentage of your customers will use far more than average, and provide for it (that's what they do here). What you don't do here is advertise "unlimited" service and start whining if a few people use it, as you perfectly well knew they would.
Saying that the poor ISPs HAVE to punish a percentage of "offenders" among the customers that buy their service is BS. ISPs who pull that stunt are ripping off some of their customers, and they know fully well that they do. Supporting edge cases makes no sense? WT flying F? It makes perfect sense businesswise to tinker with the meters on your gas pumps in order to pump less gas for the same price if you run a gas station, it's also fraud. Sorry, but these policies and their apologists just tick me off.
It is obvious that we are toddlers when it comes to understanding cosmic forces. When we can manipulate gravity to our will I will then listen to what these crackpots theorize about black holes, dark matter, and generally any other phenomena we can't OBSERVE.
Probably feeding a troll here, but... seriously, what the fuck are you going on about? Sure, you just lean back and wait until we can "manipulate gravity to our will" (don't hold your breath), meanwhile the rest of us will continue trying to figure this out. Mind you, "figuring this out" is a likely prerequisite for your goal.
What do you think about the Launch loop concept? While it is a huge undertaking, it seems to be way up from a space elevator on the feasibility scale. It would offer huge savings for putting things in orbit even compared to your tower, basically obviating the need for using (and lifting) chemical propellant for most of the delta-V needed. Any thoughts on that?
Not that much of a Nightmare, at least with modern Data classes. You take the month and year you are looking at. date(Year, Month+1, Day = 1) - 1 day. Then you get the last day of every month. Leap Year isn't the nightmare, The nightmare is the normal Month system with different days each month.
Way too complicated:)
Just convert whatever date or timestamp to/from Julian Day (the astronomical one, not ordinal day), and compare the results before and after. Very robust, functions exist in most languages (if not, the algorithm is trivial), and your dates are automagically validated. It will also handle the different-number-of-days-in-a-month problem for you.
While you're at it: <rant>
* If your data input expects dates in any formmats but ISO 8601, you're doing it wrong * If you're not using Unicode, you're doing it wrong (I blame English-centric programmers testing with lorem ipsum for this one) * If you must write a "char sep;"-separated input format, don't use any separator that WILL occur in normal text data (comma/semicolon-guys, I'm looking at you) * Document what you're expecting, don't leave me to guess...
There are more issues which should be non-issues, but these simple rules should be beaten into every programmer's head the first day at any programming-related course, and every day after that. Just a few days ago I had the pleasure of writing code which dumped data from a well-structured DB to an accounting system which demanded two different (unspecified) date formats for two columns in the same freaking row, used semicolon separation even if there were obviously user-inputted "comment" fields (with no documented escapes), and croaked on Unicode input.
</rant>, but seriously, the astronomical date thing makes date validation foolproof and throws in trivial arithmetic time period calculation for free in a portable manner. Check it out if you ever need to handle dates in your code.
What about a railgun? What about a swinging rope (like a chimpanzee swinging from branch to branch)? What about a tethered coil orbiting the central cable, rather than travelling along it? Why not pump high pressure atmosphere from the surface, and use it as a propellant?
What about a Lofstrom loop? While it is a huge project it could be constructed with materials that actually exist.
Slashdot Mirror
The long system is hardly used any place outside of Europe. So, this is one of the strange cases where the U.S. and the U.K. use the same system, and it's the system used by the majority of the world. In this case, it is France/Italy/Germany/Spain/Portugal/Netherlends that insist on using their own system.
In Norway, 10^9 is kalled a "milliard", 10^12 is a billion, and 10^18 is a trillion. While "milliard" is in common use, to avoid confusion most people use "1000 milliards" in place of billion. Trillion is strangely enough common, even though the danger of confusion is just as bad as with billion. I've also seen 10^x used regularly even in normal newspaper articles.
This sounds like an idea I had recently.
Actually, it sounds more like an idea Kenton Varda had :)
Jokes aside,
Do we have lasers that won't diverge more than a meter over a few gigameters of distance?
No, we don't. I couldn't find numbers, but as you'd probably need lenses to produce a collimated beam it'd be extremely difficult to manufacture them with enough precision. Even a meter of divergence would be far to wide to generate enough heat to cause a burst of ejected material. According to the researchers in The Fine Article you'll want to get those lasers in as close as possible.
Bla blah about the size of the state of Texas. Texas, asshole. Blah blah crayons.
Unless I'm extremely misinformed, Texas is a wee bit bigger than an estimated 10 km (about 6 miles). While still big enough to be a huge problem, Texas-sized it wasn't.
While everyone is talking about the moon, I once read about a creationist explanation about it and I was wondering how does the recession compare?
Is the math correct? That the moon would be in the Roche limit in only 1.3 GA?
http://creation.com/the-moons-recession-and-age
I'll accept your plea that you're not trolling. The math (apparently from Deyoung 1990) is not incorrect, but it's meaningless as it's based on the wrong assumption that tidal dissipation and deformation is constant over time, which has been refuted by strong paleontological evidence. The recession rate of the moon has in fact increased over time. Even if the article you're linking to were not flawed to the extent that it ignores research from the last 35+ years, the argument "Science seems to not agree on this, therefore God" is also obviously false.
Sorry I am not trolling, I am just curious about the math presented in that article. Is that formula correct? or are there any mistakes?
Depends on how you define "mistakes". Deyoung obviously has an agenda, and knew fully well that he was wrong when he wrote his article. It was no mistake, but it is deliberately misleading. It saddens me when Creationists try to invalidate large bodies of scientific evidence to justify their beliefs in a particular creation myth.
For a summary of why the science is not wrong either, this article seems to sum it up nicely. Look for the headings "The Paleontological Evidence" and "The Creationist Arguments".
You're not impressing anyone here with your made up stories of superhuman feats of strength.
Braggart.
My brother claims that an American friend of his managed to hold on to the steering wheel when the airbag deployed during regular highway driving, and that he stopped the car without incident due to this. This guy is a baseball hitter, he's built like a barrel and immensely strong. I've seen pictures of his continuous bruise which went from each hand, all the way up his arms and across his chest, but I'm still not sure I believe that it's even possible if you're caught unaware :)
Nevermind, it sounds like they've spent $200 million on this system since its inception and the site goes down due to traffic every year... that's some extreme incompetence at work.
This is a huge system which handles a lot more than peoples' tax returns, it's basically *the* portal for most of your interaction with the government. It replaces a lot of physical paper form exchange. It has saved government, corporate users and regular Joes a large amount of time, and is regarded as a success by most standards. As I see it it doesn't really make sense to build infrastructure to handle the one day in the year you will see tens of times the normal traffic, some system of rolling login slots would be sufficient. Of course, the real WTF was that poor Kenneth (36) had his financial details laid out for everyone to see due to a dirty cache, that's incredibly incompetent, I guess that some employee will not get a bonus this year...
Really they need a staggered ticket system to distribute the load over time. Issue each citizen a ticket that indicates a period when they can log in to check data, both a soonest and latest date (stragglers not tolerated). This is no different than physical scenarios where people are grouped by first letter of last name, etc. in a crowded office and then each group served sequentially to lighten the load.
Yes, they could have implemented rotating login slots based on some random digit from our SSNs, say 10 minutes for each group. "Due to heavy traffic we must limit login based on <whatever>, your next login can be made between 15:00 and 15:10". The Government is not obliged to get this information to you before you receive your printed report, and your waiting period would be at most 90 minutes anyway.
Alternatively they could maybe just display the relevant numbers in a simple table immediately after login, as it is you must find your tax report and download it as a PDF. This would also lighten the load. Most people are initially just anxious to see if they owe money or get a payback. Yours truly will, for instance, get a payout of about $2691 mainly due to deduction of interest paid on my mortgage, my curiosity that day was just to see that number. I had calculated the approximate amount in advance, but - yay :)
Someone made a pretty funny spoof site (half decent google translation). The translation will give you the gist of it if you can't read Norwegian. I especially like "Login as Kenneth (does not require password)". They missed the chance to misspell Buypass (an authentication service) as Bypass, though :)
Sorry, replied to the wrong post. Mod both my posts down.
Funny how it's the skeptics who 'claim' that an apple is going to fall towards the earth.
I'm pretty sure that sceptics and nutcases alike acknowledge that apples fall towards the earth. I haven't heard of anyone that claims otherwise.
In this case, in order to get random numbers that are more random, I suggest that you generate a large number of them, say 10,000, and then take their average. </sarcasm>
Even easier, I just rolled a die. The result was 4, guaranteed to be random. Feel free to use this result as you like.
But, for any data stored in a computer, it's generally a totally useless format, since you can't sort on it. unless you actually have it broken into fields.
Agreed, and as far as "fields" goes for days/months/whatever, that way madness lies. For storage/sorting you use whatever time types your DB/programming languages use internally, alternatively ISO 8601 for text storage (as you mention, sort of). For validation/period calculation you use/abuse the Julian date functions (astronomical, not the ordinal day). For presentation and input you use internationalisation. If you're treating dates and times as strings at any point, you're very likely Doing It Wrong (TM).
This should be beaten into every programmer's head in all programming intro courses.
No, keep doing this until we can buy directly from the authors all the time. There isn't much need for a middleman with digital goods.
I should mention that I work as a tech guy at an academic publishing company, but I write this post as a reader, albeit with a better than average insight in the actual creation process of a book.
There is a large amount of vanity-published ebooks available for free or next to nothing (but not marketed, see below). Go on, drink your fill of awkward language and sentences, grammar/spelling errors, story arcs that doesn't quite work, descriptions and whole chapters which are superfluous, plot inconsistencies, etc etc. All presented in epubs very badly converted from Word with no cover or table of contents. Then, come back and tell us again that publishers are worthless with their editors, copyeditors, proofreaders, graphic artists and layout professionals who all work together as a team. Or, you could ask published authors if they believe that their publisher added any value to their books (or just read some prefaces).
As an author, yes, you can hire all those people yourself if you have enough capital. Seriously, it's an alternative you could look into, if you're good and have a fair bit of luck it could work out for you. No, you or your friends can't do it, no matter how well you did in $language class. If you don't already have an established name, you'll probably need marketing as well, which is nicely substantiated by the fact that you (parent post) obviously haven't seen very many actual results of self-publishing.
I've actually read quite a few of those, mostly science fiction novelas and short stories. The saddest thing is when what could have been a good story is buried beneath heaps of flaws, marring the experience and diminishing the author's initial chance of making it big.
I'm not saying that what you describe couldn't be achieved if we had large pools of good, reliable and readily available freelancers. This will probably happen one day, but we're not there yet, and until then we need publishers for QA. Publishers can and do use freelancers if necessary, but even for them it's quite hard to find good ones.
If an author can't/won't use a publisher, that's fine, but he NEEDS to get professional assistance if he's serious about his work.
Are you so insanely literal that you cannot see that legends and myths sometimes DO contain a grain of truth at their cores?
No, where do I say that? There are lots of flood traditions around the world, most of them in areas where people see smaller floods regularly. The Egyptians you mention, for instance, observe yearly flooding of the Nile. I'm not sure why I bother, but: *You* mentioned Noah's Flood (not flood myths in general), and *you* linked to a pseudoscientific (at best) explanation for it in the same post. One does not need impacts to explain where flood myths originate. One does, however, need a pretty dramatic and implausible event to explain the Deluge.
My gripe is with people who seek to prove that their favourite myth is not a myth by basically trying to invalidate all other research in the fields, in a way attacking and undermining science itself. It's just as bad as any other creationist "science". Note that I infer that it is such from other sources than the group itself. They do not state it directly, but they are widely quoted on creationist websites as a defence of a literal interpretation of the Bible, in addition to everything I mentioned in my earlier post. .
"Noah's Flood" was "world-wide" only from the perspective of a very narrow slice of the "world"
Most Biblical literalists don't agree with you, see third paragraph here. Besides, it's a myth.
Oh, and I got the duration of the mythical Deluge wrong. It apparently lasted for closer to a year, the forty days I mentioned where just somewhat rainy. As if anyone cares :)
I have no idea why you were modded down, most of Piper's work is very good. Mod this guy up :)
William Hope Hodgson's "The Night Land" deserves a read. Inspiration for Lovecraft, among others.
While the setting is fascinating, the language and several other literary atrocities pretty much destroyed it for me. Until someone does a rewrite (it's in PD) I frankly can't recommend it. Lovecraft himself said that it "...is seriously marred by painful verboseness, repetitiousness, artificial and nauseously sticky romantic sentimentality, and an attempt at archaic language even more grotesque and absurd than that in Glen Carrig". I actually went so far as to search and replace the worst stylistic horrors in my ebook version in order to even get through it. The language is not even "real" archaic english, it's mostly just contrivances of Hodgson's.
I can, however, heartily recommend "The House on the Borderland" :)
Going back further, Olaf Stapledon. Truly cosmic sweep, and influential in his day.
Seconded. Star Maker is amazing, and doesn't really feel aged. Download them free of charge in various formats here :)
Depends on where it hits. One that big into the Indian Ocean could replicate Noah's Flood, which is probably what happened THEN.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burckle_Crater
Sure. An inundation of the entire world for forty days and forty nights is no problem, all you need is a big enough impact. I take it this Holocene Impact Working Group has a religious agenda?
They don't actually come out and say it (as far as I can tell), but they have a very specific time estimate (2800-3000 BCE) with no actual dating procedures performed, and they admit that their hypothesis flies in the face of most relevant research ("The scientific community, I wouldn't expect 99.9 per cent of it to agree with us"). What's more, their research is generally clutching at straws and is easily repudiated by experts in the relevant fields. All this makes it reek of religious revisionism of science, itself disguised as science.
Why can't religious nutjobs just leave science alone?
The only problem with e-books and e-readers is that they're clearly not made by readers.
Books, the good ones at least and most of the bad ones too, pay attention to typography. Paragraph-optimized justification, hyphenation, hanging punctuation, ligatures, etc. All these little things that you take for granted with a dead-tree book, but without them it's a significantly poorer experience.
I read a lot, and I make epubs for a publishing company. I've also made a lot of paper books in my time with the company, I've lost count by now, but more than a hundred. I unfortunately pay far too much attention to layout when reading, it's a curse of the trade.
When making epubs, however, you're more or less at the mercy of whichever renderer the readers are using. For a wide marked you have to aim for basic readability on the largest number of screens, which means the lowest common denominator. PDFs just doesn't work for most readers. You also run into interesting problems like "which font is legal for distribution, has the glyphs we need, is readable on small size screens (backlit or not, with different colours), and oh, is not *too* ugly".
What's good about ebooks, though, is that you can change the font, size and spacing if you want. You can usually get an acceptable result, though it'll never be as good as a paper book where the typesetter has only one target format. If you don't like the font of your a paper book, you're stuck with it.
I have both a Sony PRS-505, and an iPad. I use both, for different types of reading. The Sony is wonderful for novels and any other book that reads linearly and requires little backtracking/browsing. I use the iPad for reference, technical, and text books. The resolution and super fast refresh are much better for non-linear reading, studying, etc. That said, because I tend to have the iPad with me anyway, I do quite a bit of novel reading as well. I far prefer the reading experience on the Sony, but you're more likely to read on a device that you have with you, and if I have only the option of bringing one, I'll bring the device that is more flexible.
All of that said, try to read an iPad in the sun, then pull out a Kindle ... ++Kindle
We recently got an iPad 2 for testing purposes at work (publishing company). I brought it when visiting family at Christmas, and when I found myself without a reading light in the improvised bedroom, I started reading my current book on the iPad... and soon found out that it worked better when used as a nightlight for my E-Ink reader :)
I've worked for two ISPs.
No. This isn't about raw bandwidth. This is also about the supporting infrastructure.
It makes no sense to try to support edge use cases. It also makes no sense to let a handful of users take down service because some person wanted to run a torrent tracker.
Yes there's an oversell, but no, it's not as bad as you think.
That is completely irrelevant. Selling a service you know you won't provide is fraud. I live in a country with strong customer protection laws, the first ISP to try to pull the "secret limits" shit that providers do elsewhere would likely get slapped down. Published limits are the norm on mobile connections, and practically do not exist on household broadband.
ISPs have extremely good data about bandwidth usage distribution among customers, and can predict with a high degree of precision what kind of usage a particular service will see. If you, as an ISP, can't provide your customers with the bandwidth you promise, don't sell it. Put a non-secret limit on a cheap connection, and sell a premium service which supports 500GB/month or whatever. Or accept that a percentage of your customers will use far more than average, and provide for it (that's what they do here). What you don't do here is advertise "unlimited" service and start whining if a few people use it, as you perfectly well knew they would.
Saying that the poor ISPs HAVE to punish a percentage of "offenders" among the customers that buy their service is BS. ISPs who pull that stunt are ripping off some of their customers, and they know fully well that they do. Supporting edge cases makes no sense? WT flying F? It makes perfect sense businesswise to tinker with the meters on your gas pumps in order to pump less gas for the same price if you run a gas station, it's also fraud. Sorry, but these policies and their apologists just tick me off.
It is obvious that we are toddlers when it comes to understanding cosmic forces. When we can manipulate gravity to our will I will then listen to what these crackpots theorize about black holes, dark matter, and generally any other phenomena we can't OBSERVE.
Probably feeding a troll here, but... seriously, what the fuck are you going on about? Sure, you just lean back and wait until we can "manipulate gravity to our will" (don't hold your breath), meanwhile the rest of us will continue trying to figure this out. Mind you, "figuring this out" is a likely prerequisite for your goal.
Yes! Exoatmospheric tower next! Let's do it!
What do you think about the Launch loop concept? While it is a huge undertaking, it seems to be way up from a space elevator on the feasibility scale. It would offer huge savings for putting things in orbit even compared to your tower, basically obviating the need for using (and lifting) chemical propellant for most of the delta-V needed. Any thoughts on that?
Not that much of a Nightmare, at least with modern Data classes. You take the month and year you are looking at. date(Year, Month+1, Day = 1) - 1 day. Then you get the last day of every month. Leap Year isn't the nightmare, The nightmare is the normal Month system with different days each month.
Way too complicated :)
Just convert whatever date or timestamp to/from Julian Day (the astronomical one, not ordinal day), and compare the results before and after. Very robust, functions exist in most languages (if not, the algorithm is trivial), and your dates are automagically validated. It will also handle the different-number-of-days-in-a-month problem for you.
While you're at it: <rant>
* If your data input expects dates in any formmats but ISO 8601, you're doing it wrong
* If you're not using Unicode, you're doing it wrong (I blame English-centric programmers testing with lorem ipsum for this one)
* If you must write a "char sep;"-separated input format, don't use any separator that WILL occur in normal text data (comma/semicolon-guys, I'm looking at you)
* Document what you're expecting, don't leave me to guess...
There are more issues which should be non-issues, but these simple rules should be beaten into every programmer's head the first day at any programming-related course, and every day after that. Just a few days ago I had the pleasure of writing code which dumped data from a well-structured DB to an accounting system which demanded two different (unspecified) date formats for two columns in the same freaking row, used semicolon separation even if there were obviously user-inputted "comment" fields (with no documented escapes), and croaked on Unicode input.
</rant>, but seriously, the astronomical date thing makes date validation foolproof and throws in trivial arithmetic time period calculation for free in a portable manner. Check it out if you ever need to handle dates in your code.
What about a railgun? What about a swinging rope (like a chimpanzee swinging from branch to branch)? What about a tethered coil orbiting the central cable, rather than travelling along it? Why not pump high pressure atmosphere from the surface, and use it as a propellant?
What about a Lofstrom loop? While it is a huge project it could be constructed with materials that actually exist.