What the guy meant was to take a big-ass ion thruster, or any another kind of mass driver (for instance a linear accelerator) and mount it to the asteriod.
Then use the asteriod for mass.
That way you won't have to transport (most of) the reaction mass from Earth and can make the power plant larger at the same total weight.
TFA spells it out very nicely. Get there one orbit early (a year or a little longer) then gently tug.
Of course that's for a small asteroid, for a dinosaur killer maybe five years.
If you wait until the object is a few weeks away you are toast. Cindered toast. The entire "nuclear might" of the planet launched at the intruder will do diddley squat, Bruce Willis or no Bruce Willis.
That's why NEAR should get lots more funding.
...The major problem with using components newer than the mid-90s is that they are so sensitive to radiation. Not EM, but Alpha particles and other cosmic rays...
I've heard this argument again and again and I still don't really buy it. If the new chips are suspectible to rad, encase them in lead, problem solved. Is it the weight penalty?
Re:Yet another reason to rebuild our rail system.
on
Terminal Chaos
·
· Score: 1
Please do. You have the technology. You can rebuild it.
Build a new maglev rail infrastructure all across the US. I repeat, you have the technology. Maglev trains would kick flight's ass for short and medium distances.
[A poor hobby programmer with Apples' developer plan] If I charge $10, I get to keep $7. If 14 people in the world buy it, I've broken even.
Yikes - yes, let's keep you away from the business side of the house.
Equally yikes - yes, let's keep you away from the OSS developers side of the house. This is about not losing money just because of wanting to play around with the platform.
You forgot to include the value of your time to develop the application,
This kind of app (the <=$100 expected return one) is made for fun, as a hobby.
If you were going on a holiday in the Bahamas with your family and you somehow managed to offload some ancient Trolls pencil sharpeners (or whatever) that paid for the flight and hotel, would you argue that the trip was a loss because it didn't pay for time lost at work?
any time it might take to market it
I won't, so no cost
(e.g., even if it's just posting to Slashdot),
OK, but again that's in the fun basket, not in the work one.
any support costs,
I will support not support it at all, or only at my leisure
taxes, etc.
Good point. I will report revenue and pay taxes and so will have to sell 20 copies instead of 14. Many won't since this whole scheme seems to be a tax-evasion mechanism, at least for non-American developers.
Also, if 10K people might buy your app for their iPhone, there might be 100K people who might buy it if had a wider cell phone base, or 1000K people who might buy it if it was available for PCs, etc., so you might be chasing a tiny "profit pool" anyway if you only target the iPhone.
If a million people want a better app based on
this little thing I wrote, I would expect one of two things to happen
Many OSS developers join (preferred)
$BIG_COMPANY buys source code from me for $X million dollars. Also OK.
If the copy is perfect (and that is what I would demand) it isn't really a "copy" any more. It *is* the thing itself. If you have a.mp3 and turn it into two, which is the original? The question is meaningless.
Consciousness will not be split across the two new instances, and if a non-destructive reading has taken place there is no magic that will make your consciousness jump to the computer. You, in meatspace, will still have a continuous existence and you, in meatspace, are not suddenly immortal.
Consciousness, if defined as a unbroken chain of remembered events isn't singular. It will indeed split. Both beings - you in your flesh, and you in the silicon - will have exactly the same past.
If you're not comfortable with copies of yourself, I guess the upload Fnuk will have an option to cremate the flesh body immediately after upload.
To be fair, Rutger Hauer doesn't need to destroy the movies he's in; they're already rubbish (Bladerunner and Hitcher being about the only exceptions).
(trying to move the interesting stuff to the top)
The top and bottom part of the code code the same data. The little indentation at the beginning of the line is important and means that the previous line continues. The indentation in the bottom bottom part is of, perhaps because of writing conditions.
The top part consists of five trinary numbers of lengths 29, 46, 14, 14, 8 digits.
The bottom part consists of five binary numbers of lengths 75, 110, 37, 36, 8 digits.
My best transcription, probably with errors:
char trinary[8][40]={ "323233331112132",// 15 "33323132212331",// 14 29 "2111331132312233",// 16 "333212123213113",// 15 "311333313331111",// 15 46 "211333323232211",// 14 14 "232313331121231",// 14 14 "33231312"};// 8 8 char binary[8][40]={ "111010110101010101101010101110101101",// 36 "1101101101011101011011101011011101111",// 37 75 "1111010101101101011101010101110111011",// 37 "0111010110110111011101110111011101110",// 37 "111011011101110101101110100011101011",// 36 110 // Should have been more clearly to the left? "1010110111011101110110111010101110111",// 37 37 // Should have been two steps to the left? "011011011101101110110111010110111010",// 36 "110101011"};
Not all new input devices will meet with success. There was a lot of hype surrounding the release of Nintendo's Power Glove, and in the end it was used for only a few games and then abandoned.
Spot on. This is the new Power Glove, except even less useful.
This interface is based on some beta software for paraplegiacs, with a bandwidth of a few bytes per second, while taking months to get accustomed to as all the hard parts of the interface are shifted from hardware and software to the meat-ware, your brain.
You will not think "Go up!", and it will go up.
You will spend six months of thinking "Go up!" and slowly, slowly getting better responses, until your brain has in effect created the missing parts of the device in meat-ware. Of course even after this training, in >95% of people the meat-ware device will still perform lots worse than an actual keyboard/joystick/joypad.
I hope that you are aware that the word "fuck" can be freely used on Slashdot?
BrainFuck is a nice toy language, I wrote some simple command line apps in it.
If you really want to explode your mind, try Befunge or the other Funges. Data-is-code, in several dimensions... Multi-threaded Funge is especially cool to watch in a good debugger.
Also check out Shakespear.
Re:People use Photoshop to Dev the Web too Adobe!
on
Adobe To Port AIR To Linux
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Currently Photoshop runs essentially flawlessly using up-to-date versions of Wine
Amusing side note: In the nineties several popular programs were ported to Unix for reasons I didn't understand then, and don't now. In addition to Photoshop also MS Internet Explorer and Outlook. Imagine my disbelief and horror when I found that nasty couple installed on a production HPUX server...
I wouldn't think Adobe has just thrown away the source portability. After all portable code is expensive to create in the first place, but once you're there it's pretty cheap to maintain portability. If this is the case then they have probably had a Linux version of Photoshop, and perhaps other products for years, they just don't feel like selling them at this point.
The point I want to make is that yes, indeed, Adobe could probably release Photoshop for Linux tomorrow. Wine wouldn't be necessary. It would be the real deal, a fully native Unix/X11 application. Unless of course Adobe hasn't done criminally stupid things to the code base in the past decade...
You do realize that Microsoft made analog joysticks, and all of your favorites were digital? Of course the analog has a longer throw-- because it returns X and Y positions rather than just on or off. That was true for Gravis, Logitech, Thrustmaster, etc.
Of course I realize that, but Microsoft set the standard for what a PC joystick should be. By making a pretty good analog stick and insisting that it should be the "one size fits all" joystick - although it was unusable for 90% of games - they forced twitch gamers like myself to either use the keyboard or move to consoles. This is why we don't see joysticks anymore except as expensive flight simulator add-ons, which after all is the topic under discussion.
The TAC-2 was the only joystick to to make it through a 100 meter relay.
Ahh the nostalgia... TAC-2 was THE joystick.
Agreed. The iconic joystick before the TAC-2 was the Atari 2600 which was hell on your hands and made of plastic.
The TAC-2 had a aluminium shaft, a hard plastic top (pleasantly rounded) and huge chunks of copper in the switches. Darn near indestructible. After five years or so they'd start glitching because the copper oxidized, but you could just unscrew them and use some copper polish on the switches. The TAC-2 would still be my weapon of choice if challenging someone to a full game of Decathlon (aka JoystickBreaker, the game).
The joystick was then refined ever more, to make it faster and more responsive. My other two top nominees are the Konix SpeedKing and The Bug (similar, but more ergonomic, shiny black, usable by lefties and even shorter stick.)
Notice what happened there? The actual stick was shortened more and more to decrease response time. The end result of that evolution would probably be a tiny nub meant to be used with the index finger (which is the most mobile). Kind of similar to the thumb controllers on the PS2/3? Except you can use it with your best finger instead of your thumb?
Meanwhile, my best friend swore by his Wico
joystick which he insisted gave him "a better feeling". He would lose to me in 8:1 cases in any game, and he would always chalk it up to my "skill". This is even though I repeatedly mocked his Wico, for instance wondering if maybe his arms weren't long enough yet to swing the joystick the full two meter distance from "right" to "left".
The Wico joysticks (and followers) where the beginning of the end of the joystick. They looked good, felt good, but were horrible at actually playing games.
Then comes Microsoft. Huge fucking monstrosities that manage to look ergonomic while in actuality killing your hands, take a full week to move from "up" to "down", designed for one game (Flight Simulator) to the detriment for all others, mushy, stinky SLAP!!!
So, don't even get me started about Microsoft joysticks, even though that's the true reason why joysticks fell out of fashion. Who would buy one when Microsoft makes them all, and they are stinking, festering, pools of diarrhea from a diseased SLAP!!!!!!!
Anyway, that's a take on the history of the joystick from a guy that loves joysticks.
Slashdot Mirror
What the guy meant was to take a big-ass ion thruster, or any another kind of mass driver (for instance a linear accelerator) and mount it to the asteriod.
Then use the asteriod for mass.
That way you won't have to transport (most of) the reaction mass from Earth and can make the power plant larger at the same total weight.
When condescending the grandparent post you failed to specify what Churchill quote you was referring to. Was it this one?
TFA spells it out very nicely. Get there one orbit early (a year or a little longer) then gently tug. Of course that's for a small asteroid, for a dinosaur killer maybe five years. If you wait until the object is a few weeks away you are toast. Cindered toast. The entire "nuclear might" of the planet launched at the intruder will do diddley squat, Bruce Willis or no Bruce Willis. That's why NEAR should get lots more funding.
A trillion dollars or so.
I've heard this argument again and again and I still don't really buy it. If the new chips are suspectible to rad, encase them in lead, problem solved. Is it the weight penalty?
Please do. You have the technology. You can rebuild it.
Build a new maglev rail infrastructure all across the US. I repeat, you have the technology. Maglev trains would kick flight's ass for short and medium distances.
Because otherwise their starved-to-death carcasses would pile up high on the sidewalk, reducing your property values?
So host your freeware on AppStore. They seem to encourage it since a few of the apps in the keynote where free downloads.
Make it, upload it, set the price to 0. Any iPhone user can download it for zero cost.
Of course it still sucks that this free program will have been DRM:ed by Aplle and can't be freely exchanged between phones, but such is life.
Equally yikes - yes, let's keep you away from the OSS developers side of the house. This is about not losing money just because of wanting to play around with the platform.
This kind of app (the <=$100 expected return one) is made for fun, as a hobby.
If you were going on a holiday in the Bahamas with your family and you somehow managed to offload some ancient Trolls pencil sharpeners (or whatever) that paid for the flight and hotel, would you argue that the trip was a loss because it didn't pay for time lost at work?
I won't, so no cost
OK, but again that's in the fun basket, not in the work one.
I will support not support it at all, or only at my leisure
Good point. I will report revenue and pay taxes and so will have to sell 20 copies instead of 14. Many won't since this whole scheme seems to be a tax-evasion mechanism, at least for non-American developers.
If a million people want a better app based on this little thing I wrote, I would expect one of two things to happen
Right on!
Only max four million Indians or so, and some Negroes, probably in the lower millions.
Less than 10 million probably. Way less than 14. A little more than Hitler.
Of course none of those apes where considered citizens, or even really human. In other words: hardly any genocidal slaughter at all.
If the copy is perfect (and that is what I would demand) it isn't really a "copy" any more. It *is* the thing itself. If you have a .mp3 and turn it into two, which is the original? The question is meaningless.
Consciousness, if defined as a unbroken chain of remembered events isn't singular. It will indeed split. Both beings - you in your flesh, and you in the silicon - will have exactly the same past.
If you're not comfortable with copies of yourself, I guess the upload Fnuk will have an option to cremate the flesh body immediately after upload.
Ladyhawke is also unrubbish.
92 (Square Miles) != (92 Miles) Squared
This story is not about autonomous robots, it's about remote controlled toys.
I'm sorry, but I have a speech defect which prohibts me from intong the second "i" in any one word.
Myself, I like porcinated gum.
Big Pink! It's the only gum with the breath-freshening power of ham.
And it pinkens your teeth while you chew!
But before it went it actually did seem to be homing in on my sense of humor.
This interface is based on some beta software for paraplegiacs, with a bandwidth of a few bytes per second, while taking months to get accustomed to as all the hard parts of the interface are shifted from hardware and software to the meat-ware, your brain.
You will not think "Go up!", and it will go up.
You will spend six months of thinking "Go up!" and slowly, slowly getting better responses, until your brain has in effect created the missing parts of the device in meat-ware. Of course even after this training, in >95% of people the meat-ware device will still perform lots worse than an actual keyboard/joystick/joypad.
I hope that you are aware that the word "fuck" can be freely used on Slashdot?
BrainFuck is a nice toy language, I wrote some simple command line apps in it.
If you really want to explode your mind, try Befunge or the other Funges. Data-is-code, in several dimensions... Multi-threaded Funge is especially cool to watch in a good debugger.
Also check out Shakespear.
Yes, but who wants Wine if you can get a native app? Photoshop was designed to be portable, and was released for SunOS and SGI IRIX.
Amusing side note: In the nineties several popular programs were ported to Unix for reasons I didn't understand then, and don't now. In addition to Photoshop also MS Internet Explorer and Outlook. Imagine my disbelief and horror when I found that nasty couple installed on a production HPUX server...
I wouldn't think Adobe has just thrown away the source portability. After all portable code is expensive to create in the first place, but once you're there it's pretty cheap to maintain portability. If this is the case then they have probably had a Linux version of Photoshop, and perhaps other products for years, they just don't feel like selling them at this point.
The point I want to make is that yes, indeed, Adobe could probably release Photoshop for Linux tomorrow. Wine wouldn't be necessary. It would be the real deal, a fully native Unix/X11 application. Unless of course Adobe hasn't done criminally stupid things to the code base in the past decade...
Of course I realize that, but Microsoft set the standard for what a PC joystick should be. By making a pretty good analog stick and insisting that it should be the "one size fits all" joystick - although it was unusable for 90% of games - they forced twitch gamers like myself to either use the keyboard or move to consoles. This is why we don't see joysticks anymore except as expensive flight simulator add-ons, which after all is the topic under discussion.
Agreed. The iconic joystick before the TAC-2 was the Atari 2600 which was hell on your hands and made of plastic.
The TAC-2 had a aluminium shaft, a hard plastic top (pleasantly rounded) and huge chunks of copper in the switches. Darn near indestructible. After five years or so they'd start glitching because the copper oxidized, but you could just unscrew them and use some copper polish on the switches. The TAC-2 would still be my weapon of choice if challenging someone to a full game of Decathlon (aka JoystickBreaker, the game).
The joystick was then refined ever more, to make it faster and more responsive. My other two top nominees are the Konix SpeedKing and The Bug (similar, but more ergonomic, shiny black, usable by lefties and even shorter stick.)
Notice what happened there? The actual stick was shortened more and more to decrease response time. The end result of that evolution would probably be a tiny nub meant to be used with the index finger (which is the most mobile). Kind of similar to the thumb controllers on the PS2/3? Except you can use it with your best finger instead of your thumb?
Meanwhile, my best friend swore by his Wico joystick which he insisted gave him "a better feeling". He would lose to me in 8:1 cases in any game, and he would always chalk it up to my "skill". This is even though I repeatedly mocked his Wico, for instance wondering if maybe his arms weren't long enough yet to swing the joystick the full two meter distance from "right" to "left".
The Wico joysticks (and followers) where the beginning of the end of the joystick. They looked good, felt good, but were horrible at actually playing games.
Then comes Microsoft. Huge fucking monstrosities that manage to look ergonomic while in actuality killing your hands, take a full week to move from "up" to "down", designed for one game (Flight Simulator) to the detriment for all others, mushy, stinky SLAP!!!
So, don't even get me started about Microsoft joysticks, even though that's the true reason why joysticks fell out of fashion. Who would buy one when Microsoft makes them all, and they are stinking, festering, pools of diarrhea from a diseased SLAP!!!!!!!
Anyway, that's a take on the history of the joystick from a guy that loves joysticks.