In addition to the Japanese project, a Russian nuclear sub crew will get some live-fire training while launching the (privately-funded) Planetary Society's Cosmos 1 solar sail project in March of 2005.
There are also companies that partner with Russian airbases to take wealthy Westerners up in basically anything with wings. Having a Yankee in the back seat pays for the gas and maintenance, and helps the pilot get some flight hours.
Hey, if you're short on hard currency to pay your troops, why not take some Western cash and make someone happy (whether it be through launching a space probe or giving 'em the ride of a lifetime) while your troops are getting their training.
> Where did these numbers come from? They are such small amounts at this scale that it's a little hard for me to believe there is empirical evidence for this. Is there or is this just theory?
Corner cube laser reflectors left by the Apollo missions can (and are) used to measure the moon's distance from the Earth with the required accuracy.
> What kind of global climate changes could be experienced due to the alteration of the Earth's axis by one inch?
"Have you any idea how much damage that 6000-mile-wide bulldozer would suffer if I just let it run straight over you, Mister Dent?"
"No, how much?"
"None at all."
By a strange coincidence, "None at all" is exactly the amount of global climate changes that would be experienced due to the alteration of the Earth's axis by one inch.
> > [derivation of $350 spent per tsunami victim snipped for brevity]
> >$147000000,000 - spent on war in Iraq
> > 17000 - rough number of Iraqis killed
> > = $8,647,058 - spent to kill each Iraqi
> >I'm ashamed to be an American. Call me a troll if you want, but these numbers are sickening.
>
>$147,000,000,000 - spent on war in Iraq
>25,000,000 - number of people freed from dictator
>= $5880 - spent to free an individual
>
I'm proud to be an American. Call me a troll if you want, but at least I know my country _did_ something.
Suppose we drop a cheap ($10M) set of nukes across Baghdad and in doing so, kill 1,000,000 people.
That comes out to:
$1,445,526 - spent to kill each Iraqi, and
$61,204 - spent to free an individual.
In short, the nuclear annihilation of 1,000,000 civilians would cut the cost of each preventable civilian death by 85%, while simultaneously boosting per capita humanitarian spending per capita by 20%. And somehow both of you would regard this as an improvement?
I'm ashamed when Americans attempt to optimize the wrong metric. Call me a QA weenie if you want, but at least I know something about process engineering!
> > x-wife
> >X-wife?? I bow to your geekhood. You truly are a geek Sir. And I mean it in a good way.
We don't know enough to make that claim yet. What are the licensing terms? Closed-source? Phone-home protection system? Nagware? Is she into BSD, or compliant with the GPL?
/sings "Join us now, and share the, umm... software?" //is going to hell for that.
> This sillyness of having to generate postscript so Ghostscript can generate PCL so you can print is just wrong - empty brained, someone forgot to wake up wrong. > >PCL is available on every major printer on the market today - it IS the standard. PostScript is a has-been. Dump it today.
Huh? I think you've got that backwards.
PCL requires that most of the "brains" exist on the "computer" side of the "computer/printer" connection. A PCL printer needs less "brains" than a Postscript printer because all the processing is done on the "computer" side of the connection.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but a PCL printer is to a Postscript printer what a Winmodem is to a hardware modem.
For printers, the PCL tradeoff made a lot of sense sense when embedded CPUs were (extremely) limited in computational power compared with desktop CPUs. Rather than have your $1500 486-33 sitting idle as it dumps a pile of Postscript code to another $1000 68020 in the printer, I'll use my $1500 desktop CPU to turn my document into PCL that can be parsed by the $1.99 Z80 or whatever's in my $100 PCL printer.
Now that your $25 disposable cell phone has a 200 MHz core, that tradeoff is no longer a requirement. Embedded systems smart enough to interpret and run Postscript code are no more (and no less) expensive than those capable only of PCL.
Methinks you've got the PCL/Postscript design tradeoff backwards.
> What insightful answers did the rest of Slashdot give when they applied to work at Google? To repeat the actual question, 'What's broken with Unix? How would you fix it?'
"The fact that I have yet to receive significant monetary compensation for working with it. I would fix it by having someone at Google to hire me with a starting offer of $100,000 per year salary and a signing bonus of options for 50,000 shares of pre-IPO Google stock."
Why are you looking at me like that? I figured all the good jobs were gone, so I was trying for a marketing position.
> Well, retinal degenerative diseases and remodeling is my forte, but I do recall that red lasers in the 3-5Mw range should cause no retinal damage per se.
...on account of it being hard to examine the retina when there's nothing left of the head but some vapor.
There are, however, red lasers in the milliWatt range for which the blink/aversion response is (probably) fast enough to prevent damage.
> So, the currently accepted wattage figures on the threshold of immediate tissue damage are in the 30-50Mw range.
True. Because on the battlefield, there's no such thing as overkill!
> They should make a Matrix game in the theme of Star Wars. So then you take out your sword and run up to a guy and go, "Chiiing!"
...that's Raph Koster of SOE, responsible for SWG:A Galaxy of Melee Combat.
> And after you saw through his head, you fly inside your X-wing."
Oh, give up up, Raph. Nobody's playing SWG:Jump to Lightspeed either.
God of the Gaps: Glass half-full or half-empty?
on
Subatomic Darwinism
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
> This is known as the "God of the Gaps" approach; God is assigned responsibility for whatever science can't currently explain. As you point out, the problem with this approach is that God keep shrinking as the gaps get filled in.
Is the glass half-full or half-empty?
God, 1200 AD: "Big guy created the whole thing 5200 years ago."
God, 1800 AD: "Clever big guy created the whole thing 5800 years ago. And had to plunk some planets and set up an inverse square law for gravitation. And bury a bunch of weird lizard fossils to confuse us. Either that, or he's been doing some really weird tricks with biology that we're only beginning to guess at."
God, 1950 AD: "Really clever guy (way cleverer than us) created the whole thing out of, umm, something, we don't really know when, but it was a hell of a long time ago, and made particles that behaved like, umm, waves. It's weird and violates common sense, but we can use the math to make televisions. And BTW, now we know how the Sun works."
God, 2004 AD: "Supremely clever dude, existing completely outside of what we perceive as spacetime, may have tweaked an m-brane collision (the math for which only a few hundred of us on the planet can even begin to understand) that resulted in the setting of a few universal constants for the physics engine and the creation of a little bubble of spacetime. Sat back and watched the resulting fireworks for 13.8 billion years to see if sentient life would evolve in a little pocket of it and recognize Him."
Without taking a position either way on the existence or non-existence of God, I humbly submit that the more science we do, the smarter the "God of the Gaps" has to be.
> We need to combine our efforts. >
We need to build a monumentally massive tin hat for the world.
How about a tinfoil hat for one side of the asteroid?
Unfortunately, the Yarkovsky Effect - deflecting an asteroid by differentially heating parts of its surface - is likely to be too small to save us. Deflection of a rock comparable in size to 2004MN4, namely 6489 Golevka, was observed as 15km in 12 years of observation. Depending on the eventual impact point (if any) of 2004MN4, we may have to deflect it by thousands of kilometers.
Yes, you'll probably get much more deflection by wrapping half the rock in mylar (and/or dusting the other half of it with soot), rather than relying on the natural effect observed on 6489 Golevka, but we don't know enough about 2004MN4 (albedo/mass) to guess yet.
> I think it's about time that the governments of the world start to work together to address the threat of an asteroid colliding with earth, instead of focusing on killing one another.
False dichotomy.
Starlog April 13, 2019: With ten years to go, we have arrived asteroid 2004MN4 and are ready to land the nuclear reactor that will power the ion engine thrusters.
Starlog April 14, 2019: Engines firmly secured to the rock and now active, we're prepared to burn the last of our fuel supply to put us on a transfer orbit that will take us back to Earth.
Starlog April 15, 2019: We placed four ion engines on the sunlit side of 2004MN4. Yet my first officer has just reported sighting six blue glowy things in a crater on the dark side of the asteroid. Must be imagining things.
April 12, 2029: North Korean People's Daily News headline reads "PWN3D!"
> Ok fine, as long as you don't become a problem for the system you're (more or less) left alone... it's called jus murmurandi. Any non liberal political system is very lax in applying such repression so not to alienate the majority of the subdued masses; which are pretty condescending as long as their primary needs are satisfied. But don't worry, the moment you become a threat, you're quite certain there's some obscure, anal retentive prohibition, you'll get fucked over with.
So in other words, you get the security benefits of a police state, and 99.999999% of your population gets the freedom benefits of a liberal democracy.
Sign me up. At present, we've got the bad parts of this system, but without the security. The Chinese model (stable political structure, growing middle class, astounding GDP growth) is looking more attractive all the time.
Based in part on our restrictive default exit policy (we reject SMTP requests) and our low profile, we have had no abuse issues since the network was deployed in October 2003. Our slow growth rate gives us time to add features, resolve bugs, and get a feel for what users actually want from an anonymity system. Even though having more users would bolster our anonymity sets, we are not eager to attract the Kazaa or warez communities-we feel that we must build a reputation for privacy, human rights, research, and other socially laudable activities.
Of course, for every stupid, bizarre, or just plain wonky idea, there already exists at least a semi-serious proponent. Proof is left as an exercise for Google
From the second Google hit on "mammoth wooly rocket", I quote:
Flight at mach 3.0 from rocket booster in the rump, electric beams from tusks, missiles come from the two nostrils of the trunk
Slashdot Mirror
There are also companies that partner with Russian airbases to take wealthy Westerners up in basically anything with wings. Having a Yankee in the back seat pays for the gas and maintenance, and helps the pilot get some flight hours.
Hey, if you're short on hard currency to pay your troops, why not take some Western cash and make someone happy (whether it be through launching a space probe or giving 'em the ride of a lifetime) while your troops are getting their training.
Corner cube laser reflectors left by the Apollo missions can (and are) used to measure the moon's distance from the Earth with the required accuracy.
See also http://www.gsfc.nasa.gov/scienceques2002/20030425. htm.
"Have you any idea how much damage that 6000-mile-wide bulldozer would suffer if I just let it run straight over you, Mister Dent?"
"No, how much?"
"None at all."
By a strange coincidence, "None at all" is exactly the amount of global climate changes that would be experienced due to the alteration of the Earth's axis by one inch.
(Dividing by ten is another story. $6,120 - not $61204. But the "20%" figure was correct :)
> >$147000000,000 - spent on war in Iraq
> > 17000 - rough number of Iraqis killed
> > = $8,647,058 - spent to kill each Iraqi
> >I'm ashamed to be an American. Call me a troll if you want, but these numbers are sickening.
>
>$147,000,000,000 - spent on war in Iraq
>25,000,000 - number of people freed from dictator
>= $5880 - spent to free an individual
> I'm proud to be an American. Call me a troll if you want, but at least I know my country _did_ something.
Suppose we drop a cheap ($10M) set of nukes across Baghdad and in doing so, kill 1,000,000 people.
$147,010,000,000 spent.
1,017,000 Iraqis dead.
24,000,000 Iraqis liberated.
That comes out to:
$1,445,526 - spent to kill each Iraqi, and
$61,204 - spent to free an individual.
In short, the nuclear annihilation of 1,000,000 civilians would cut the cost of each preventable civilian death by 85%, while simultaneously boosting per capita humanitarian spending per capita by 20%. And somehow both of you would regard this as an improvement?
I'm ashamed when Americans attempt to optimize the wrong metric. Call me a QA weenie if you want, but at least I know something about process engineering!
>
>X-wife?? I bow to your geekhood. You truly are a geek Sir. And I mean it in a good way.
We don't know enough to make that claim yet. What are the licensing terms? Closed-source? Phone-home protection system? Nagware? Is she into BSD, or compliant with the GPL?
>
>PCL is available on every major printer on the market today - it IS the standard. PostScript is a has-been. Dump it today.
Huh? I think you've got that backwards.
PCL requires that most of the "brains" exist on the "computer" side of the "computer/printer" connection. A PCL printer needs less "brains" than a Postscript printer because all the processing is done on the "computer" side of the connection.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but a PCL printer is to a Postscript printer what a Winmodem is to a hardware modem.
For printers, the PCL tradeoff made a lot of sense sense when embedded CPUs were (extremely) limited in computational power compared with desktop CPUs. Rather than have your $1500 486-33 sitting idle as it dumps a pile of Postscript code to another $1000 68020 in the printer, I'll use my $1500 desktop CPU to turn my document into PCL that can be parsed by the $1.99 Z80 or whatever's in my $100 PCL printer.
Now that your $25 disposable cell phone has a 200 MHz core, that tradeoff is no longer a requirement. Embedded systems smart enough to interpret and run Postscript code are no more (and no less) expensive than those capable only of PCL.
Methinks you've got the PCL/Postscript design tradeoff backwards.
"The fact that I have yet to receive significant monetary compensation for working with it. I would fix it by having someone at Google to hire me with a starting offer of $100,000 per year salary and a signing bonus of options for 50,000 shares of pre-IPO Google stock."
Why are you looking at me like that? I figured all the good jobs were gone, so I was trying for a marketing position.
There are, however, red lasers in the milliWatt range for which the blink/aversion response is (probably) fast enough to prevent damage.
> So, the currently accepted wattage figures on the threshold of immediate tissue damage are in the 30-50Mw range.
True. Because on the battlefield, there's no such thing as overkill!
> And after you saw through his head, you fly inside your X-wing."
Oh, give up up, Raph. Nobody's playing SWG:Jump to Lightspeed either.
Is the glass half-full or half-empty?
God, 1200 AD: "Big guy created the whole thing 5200 years ago."
God, 1800 AD: "Clever big guy created the whole thing 5800 years ago. And had to plunk some planets and set up an inverse square law for gravitation. And bury a bunch of weird lizard fossils to confuse us. Either that, or he's been doing some really weird tricks with biology that we're only beginning to guess at."
God, 1950 AD: "Really clever guy (way cleverer than us) created the whole thing out of, umm, something, we don't really know when, but it was a hell of a long time ago, and made particles that behaved like, umm, waves. It's weird and violates common sense, but we can use the math to make televisions. And BTW, now we know how the Sun works."
God, 2004 AD: "Supremely clever dude, existing completely outside of what we perceive as spacetime, may have tweaked an m-brane collision (the math for which only a few hundred of us on the planet can even begin to understand) that resulted in the setting of a few universal constants for the physics engine and the creation of a little bubble of spacetime. Sat back and watched the resulting fireworks for 13.8 billion years to see if sentient life would evolve in a little pocket of it and recognize Him."
Without taking a position either way on the existence or non-existence of God, I humbly submit that the more science we do, the smarter the "God of the Gaps" has to be.
>
>You are choosing a non-objective reality, and there's nothing wrong with that.
Hey. Get your hands off his wave function. By posting your observation about him, you're collapsing it for me too!
NASA's computers survived a Slashdotting this morning, and they decided to get cocky?
"ACME! The only Bat-Man outfit worn by bats!"
> We need to build a monumentally massive tin hat for the world.
How about a tinfoil hat for one side of the asteroid?
Unfortunately, the Yarkovsky Effect - deflecting an asteroid by differentially heating parts of its surface - is likely to be too small to save us. Deflection of a rock comparable in size to 2004MN4, namely 6489 Golevka, was observed as 15km in 12 years of observation. Depending on the eventual impact point (if any) of 2004MN4, we may have to deflect it by thousands of kilometers.
Yes, you'll probably get much more deflection by wrapping half the rock in mylar (and/or dusting the other half of it with soot), rather than relying on the natural effect observed on 6489 Golevka, but we don't know enough about 2004MN4 (albedo/mass) to guess yet.
"Yes".
(The only time I played roulette was in Europe. There's one "0" in Europe, but two - "0 and 00" - in USA.)
False dichotomy.
Starlog April 13, 2019: With ten years to go, we have arrived asteroid 2004MN4 and are ready to land the nuclear reactor that will power the ion engine thrusters.
Starlog April 14, 2019: Engines firmly secured to the rock and now active, we're prepared to burn the last of our fuel supply to put us on a transfer orbit that will take us back to Earth.
Starlog April 15, 2019: We placed four ion engines on the sunlit side of 2004MN4. Yet my first officer has just reported sighting six blue glowy things in a crater on the dark side of the asteroid. Must be imagining things.
April 12, 2029: North Korean People's Daily News headline reads "PWN3D!"
Bah!
I'm betting $100 on the roulette wheel. $50 on black. $50 on red. I should be able to play forever, because hey, what are the odds I'll ever lose?
So in other words, you get the security benefits of a police state, and 99.999999% of your population gets the freedom benefits of a liberal democracy.
Sign me up. At present, we've got the bad parts of this system, but without the security. The Chinese model (stable political structure, growing middle class, astounding GDP growth) is looking more attractive all the time.
Skydiver: "There's no such thing as a perfectly good airplane!"
Pilot: "There's also no such thing as a perfectly good parachute."
Skydiver: "That's why we carry two of 'em!"
(Thank you, thank you, tip your server, don't forget to try the veeeeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaallll...)
"Once ze lawn darts go up,
who cares where zey come down?
Zat's not my department!"
Says Werner von Braun...
>
>And the 'orbital orgy' just replaced Natalie Portman as bedtime fantasy for geeks everywhere...
For $250K, my orbital orgy had damn well better be with Natalie Portman.
Well, so much for that. *badaboom*
"Boeing Successfully Launches Mammoth Delta-4 Heavy"
Of course, for every stupid, bizarre, or just plain wonky idea, there already exists at least a semi-serious proponent. Proof is left as an exercise for Google
From the second Google hit on "mammoth wooly rocket", I quote:
It gets weird after that.