Redundancy.. Every computer has parts, and each of those parts has a cross section. If you have 3 computers, then you can use integrity checks to detect computers that have been zapped by radiation and are not running properly. When this happens to a computer it usually means some part has been struck by a xray or something.
Suppose a 'computer' has 3 parts the A-chip the B-chip and the C-chip. There are 3 redundant computers. The A-chip in computer 1 gets fried, the B-chip in computer 2 gets fried and the C-chip in computer 3 gets fried. Now you have 3 broken computers yet 2/3 of your chips remain unfried. You could build 2 more computers with your still functioning parts. I wonder if the parts in the RAD6000 are internally redundant. Is the 'A-chip' in the RAD6000 actually consist of 3 redundant A-chips and an integrity checker? It would seem that the smaller your redundant systems' cross sections were and the finer the grain of your integrity checks were the better your chances of mission success.
If each square cm of board has P =.01 of being zapped by a ray during the mission then a 100 sqcm board has a 37% chance of surviving if there are 3 redundant 100 sq cm computers then there is a 25% chance they all will die during the mission. But if each sqcm has redundant copies of itself which are integrity checked, the probability that every single square centimeter on the 100sqcm board will still have a functioning copy of itself and so the probability that the board as a whole will survive the mission is 99.99% a 0.01% failure rate.
Someone said a while back that a house made of aerogel would need only a candle to heat it. Surely surrounding the electronics in and Aerogel box would trap so much heat they would melt themselves. I understand that they have to shut the electronics off at night, so the radioisotope heaters make sence, but why all the other heaters?
There is TONS of information to be learned from the levels of isotopes and natural radiation in our solar system, but spewing radiologically hot stuff out the backs of rockets would ruin that data for all time. On Earth, carbon 14 dating can't be used to date materials from after the first atomic bomb blast. Who knows what information you'd ruin with a dirty rocket?
Those 8"x11" rectangular games with 12 colored and lighted buttons from Radio Shack ( I still think they sell 'em though they've been sold forever ) There were 12 ( or was it 15? ) games, one for each button. There were various versions of 'memory' where a sequence of buttons would light up and you would have to duplicate it by pressing them. There was also 'tag' where you had to press the lit button that kept moving around ( kinda like bash-a-gopher at the amusement-park-arcade ) It was pretty fun for in the car since it didn't make you car sick, and it ran off D-Cells which meant that the batterys lasted a LONG time.
In the attic, when I was a kid, I found a 30 lb adding machine. It could add, subtract, multiply, and divide, printing the results on tape. The whole thing plugged into the wall, but all the calculations were done *mechanically* that is, they were done with gears and sprockets instead of microchips or even vacuum tubes. The thing was quite loud, but the cover came off so you could watch the mind boggling assemblage of metal move strangely to calculate the answers, and also so you could change the tape.. The tape was nice before the days of spreadsheets and graphing calculators with nice multiline LCD screens. I still use my TI-81 from my college days to balance my checkbook because I can see what I typed and check for errors without firing up the computer. Oh how the mighty have fallen...
Yesterday newscientist.com had an article about errors in paralax measurements of nearby star clusters. Basically, they measure the angle to point at the nearby star cluster at 2 different times, six months apart so that the earth is at opposite ends of it's orbit giving the most accurate data. They *must* have considered this being smart astronomer people, but if the whole solar system were moving, relative to the star cluster or vice versa then that would have to be taken into account....
Who cares if it contains silver or not. Maybe they're using gold or something better instead. The purpose of a heat sink is to.. radiate heat - not to look good on your wrist.
If the war were simply about oil, then we would have simply dropped the sanctions
The war was simply about oil, but dropping the sanctions especially after 9/11 would have been political suicide.
The first Gulf War was not about saving Kuwait, a country most Americans had never heard of nor could give a damn about from Saddaam, it was about protecting the spigots that lead into the vast oil aquifer shared by Iraq and Kuwait. If it weren't for that original oil war, then Saddaam would not have been on our shitlist after 9/11 and would still be in power now. He would probably be currying favor with the US by letting us send captured Al Queda types to his torture dungeons for 'clean hands' interrogation.
People always find ways of heaping the costs of tons of other things onto a cost they are calculating when trying to make a point. For instance, when a hacker does some damage to a company, like posting 100 stolen credit card numbers, they will come up with a damages number in the billions. They might, for instance, say that if it wasn't for hackers like him, they wouldn't need a IT Security department ( which in this case failed to prevent a breach ) Then you consider that every person in IT Security needs a network connection, so any part of the cost of the corporate network that would be essential to providing the IT Security department with internet access, even if those same routers etc also serve the rest of the company will be tacked onto the cost of IT Security's maintenance and so also tacked onto the damage figure for the breach. If another breach is made next week, the same expenses that were previously attributed to the damage done by the first breach will be attributed to the second breach in their entirety a second time.
And the loss of customer trust caused by the breach will reverberate throughout the company. Loss of customer trust, caused by the breach and publicised in a small article on the 12th page of the newspaper will disrupt the entire marketing campaign for the conglomerate. The image the company has strived for including customer confidence in the security procedures of MegaCorp Inc, is now tarnished and so the entire mega-millions cost of all marketing for MegaCorp Inc's products for the last 5 years will have to be included in the damage estimate. This figure will be included again in estimates for any future breaches.
So when they calculate the cost of moving a gallon of oil into baghdad they are probably calculating the cost of the Tank Escort, and all the troops in the troop carrier in the same convoy, as well as the bradley fighting vehicles and air cover. All these vehicles would be going to baghdad anyway even if they required no fuel, and air cover would still be provided to the convoy regardless of there being a fuel truck. But the entire cost of all these vehicles will be tacked onto the cost for transproting the gas as if bringing gas to baghdad were the end goal for going there. The gas truck is, in reality just tagging along.
And we probably already had the gas truck.
If you calculate the cost of maintaining a piece of military equipment and personel between wars, and then use that number as the cost incurred by using that equipment and personel *in* a war, even though the cost would have been incurred with or without the war, then you can really jack up the numbers.
If the cost of war were calculated as the cost of consumables, plus increased pay & benefits ( since we have a military regardless of whether we are fighting a war ) then it might turn out that war is cheap in terms of money...
Diatom skeletons are made of silicon dioxide. Grinding up aerogel seems like a waste of time when diatomaceous earth can be mined by the dump truck load.
Diatomaceous earth is 100% natural microscopic glass shards. Being microscopic glass shards they are an excellent insecticide. The shards pierce the insect's shell and through capilarry action, they suck out all the internal fluids drying the bug to a corpse. However, the shards are so small that humans can ingest them without fear of harm.
So if you have a garden, or some veggies or other food you want to protect from insect pests without using a substance toxic to humans and pets, sprinkle on a little diatomaceous earth. Better yet mix up some garlic powder, water and diatomaceous earth in a bottle and spray it on. Garlic kills bugz too w/o being dangerous for ppl.
[kidding]And tie it in loosely with Herbert's Dune Series. Have some drug on a sandy planet populated by Giant Worms be the only way to navigate. Also Hokey religion-parodies. [/kidding]
Everyone has at least one good star trek episode in them. They ought to run it like America's Funniest Animals: If we use your script ( possibly polished up by some hacks ) in an episode of the new series, Star Trek: Even Tighter Tights, then we'll send you a Tee-Shirt and $100.00
Star Trek in order from best to worst ( Items in Parens are equal to each other in 'goodness' )
(2,4),3,First Contact,(6,Space-Rainbow-Thingy,1),1,(Nemesis,5)
Once the telescope becomes useless, it seems to me that it should be considered Junk, and ripe for salvage. A private company could take it over and sell online time on it to those who want to peep into other people's windows.
As soon as I can go to the moon, I am going to build a huge LAZER and blow up the Earth. As soon as I can go to Mars, I am sending into Boy's Life for a PU31 Space Modulator.
Hes, you could calculate the SHA256 hash and know that a file was *probably* the same as a known copyrighted one, but the P2P service would have to maintain a database of hashes of all copyrighted files and take queries from each node that check on each file in their shared folder. This is alot of bandwidth when you consider all the nodes. There would have to be a way of adding new hashes to the database of unshareables too that was fair. For instance you wouldn't want to have the Church of Scientology submit the hashes of all the anit-scientology rantfiles they want censored claiming copyright violation.
You could send criminals sentenced to death or life in prison. You say: You can spend the rest of your pointless life utterly alone with your 'friend' Bubba in an 8x10 cell, or make something of yourself by being the first human space colonist. Full pardon promisedon arrival at Mars. Also, if you've learned to *like* Bubba, he can come too...
Sure such a person might want to strike back at society by destroying the mission, but then the right person might see it as an opportunity for redemption, and adventure.
The biggest problem would be the Earth's commitment to continue sending supplies. 'Aww they are just a bunch of murderers, let em starve' might set in if the public lost interest, although that's an incentive to keep them working on science. Not that there would be much else for them to do to stave off boredom...
One paragraph after you complain about a lack of character development, you complain that Obi-Wan isn't the same 40 or 50 years earlier? Find me someone who acts the same at 20 as they do at 60 and I'll show you someone with some big developmental or emotional problems.
It is true that people change, but parts also stay the same. Obi Wan in Ep 1 seemed like a completely different person than the Obi Wan of Ep 4,5,6. I would have liked to see circumstances change him from being one way to being like he is when he is older.
I've never heard this from anywhere "official," but my take was that during the prequels galactic culture is at its peak, everything is new and bright and vibrant. But after 30 or so years of war and opression, things don't look so nice and clean anymore. Especially in the backwater places, where most of the original trilogy took place. We never see Naboo or Coruscant during IV, V, and VI, which is where all the gawdiness was coming from.
When I was talking about Mos Eisley being spare I was talking about Ep 4. I was complaining, not about the Mos Eisley of Ep 1, but about the changes to the Mos Eisley of Ep 4.
Year: 2038
Headline Star Wars Episode 9 Completed. Episodes I through VI redone to remove inconsistencies ( just under nuclear disaster caused by 32 bit date rollover )
01 Anakin is now an Ewok in all episodes
02 Jabba The Hut actually molests Princess Leia
03...
Seems Star Wars will never be finished..
I totally agree. I tried to watch Attack of the Clones the other day on HBO and couldn't sit through it. The dialogue is just inane. I don't think story writing is Lucas's forte. He's a great scene builder. He can create the 'feeling' of a 'rebellion' or an 'evil empire' or a 'mysterious jedi cult' but the fact that Mark Hamill could star as Luke Skywalker and not completely ruin the first three movies means there was no acting involved in playing the part. No acting was required because there was no *character development*. Those movies were a plot centric amusement park ride, a cool universe you could imagine yourself in. Nobody in Star Wars 4,5,6 changed at all really if you think about it. But the universe and the ride was artfully done and I loved those movies.
Obi Wan's character in Episode I was probably the worst thing about the movie other than Jar Jar Binks. The guy should have been identifiable as the same Obi Wan we all knew. He was just Qui Gon Jin's 'Igor-like' monk.
In AOTC, Anakin is a badly acted whining little baby. Lucas should have hired a real writer to develop him into a believeable Darth Vader precursor. Anakin, being so important in all the movies really needs to be real.
Lucas needs to make it less gawdy. The scenes in Mos Eisley were spare - almost desolate, which is what you would expect for a desert planet in the middle of nowhere. Then Lucas adds extra computer generated stuff to it. The desert planet in the middle of nowhere that was so boring Luke couldn't wait to leave now seemed like a happening place which detracted from the movie.
The battles in episodes I and II are dazzlingly detailed. Rather than showing all that detail all the time just because he can, he needs to stop and consider what would actually be there and leave most of the things out that don't have a purpose. Less detail is sometimes more realistic IMO.
Slashdot Mirror
Suppose a 'computer' has 3 parts the A-chip the B-chip and the C-chip. There are 3 redundant computers. The A-chip in computer 1 gets fried, the B-chip in computer 2 gets fried and the C-chip in computer 3 gets fried. Now you have 3 broken computers yet 2/3 of your chips remain unfried. You could build 2 more computers with your still functioning parts. I wonder if the parts in the RAD6000 are internally redundant. Is the 'A-chip' in the RAD6000 actually consist of 3 redundant A-chips and an integrity checker? It would seem that the smaller your redundant systems' cross sections were and the finer the grain of your integrity checks were the better your chances of mission success.
If each square cm of board has P = .01 of being zapped by a ray during the mission then a 100 sqcm board has a 37% chance of surviving if there are 3 redundant 100 sq cm computers then there is a 25% chance they all will die during the mission. But if each sqcm has redundant copies of itself which are integrity checked, the probability that every single square centimeter on the 100sqcm board will still have a functioning copy of itself and so the probability that the board as a whole will survive the mission is 99.99% a 0.01% failure rate.
Clearly 0.01% failure is better than 25% failure.
Someone said a while back that a house made of aerogel would need only a candle to heat it. Surely surrounding the electronics in and Aerogel box would trap so much heat they would melt themselves. I understand that they have to shut the electronics off at night, so the radioisotope heaters make sence, but why all the other heaters?
There is TONS of information to be learned from the levels of isotopes and natural radiation in our solar system, but spewing radiologically hot stuff out the backs of rockets would ruin that data for all time. On Earth, carbon 14 dating can't be used to date materials from after the first atomic bomb blast. Who knows what information you'd ruin with a dirty rocket?
Me too, and can you see Earth? What color is it when viewed all the way from Marz?
Those 8"x11" rectangular games with 12 colored and lighted buttons from Radio Shack ( I still think they sell 'em though they've been sold forever ) There were 12 ( or was it 15? ) games, one for each button. There were various versions of 'memory' where a sequence of buttons would light up and you would have to duplicate it by pressing them. There was also 'tag' where you had to press the lit button that kept moving around ( kinda like bash-a-gopher at the amusement-park-arcade ) It was pretty fun for in the car since it didn't make you car sick, and it ran off D-Cells which meant that the batterys lasted a LONG time.
In the attic, when I was a kid, I found a 30 lb adding machine. It could add, subtract, multiply, and divide, printing the results on tape. The whole thing plugged into the wall, but all the calculations were done *mechanically* that is, they were done with gears and sprockets instead of microchips or even vacuum tubes. The thing was quite loud, but the cover came off so you could watch the mind boggling assemblage of metal move strangely to calculate the answers, and also so you could change the tape.. The tape was nice before the days of spreadsheets and graphing calculators with nice multiline LCD screens. I still use my TI-81 from my college days to balance my checkbook because I can see what I typed and check for errors without firing up the computer. Oh how the mighty have fallen...
Yesterday newscientist.com had an article about errors in paralax measurements of nearby star clusters. Basically, they measure the angle to point at the nearby star cluster at 2 different times, six months apart so that the earth is at opposite ends of it's orbit giving the most accurate data. They *must* have considered this being smart astronomer people, but if the whole solar system were moving, relative to the star cluster or vice versa then that would have to be taken into account....
Who cares if it contains silver or not. Maybe they're using gold or something better instead. The purpose of a heat sink is to .. radiate heat - not to look good on your wrist.
LMAO!!
The war was simply about oil, but dropping the sanctions especially after 9/11 would have been political suicide.
The first Gulf War was not about saving Kuwait, a country most Americans had never heard of nor could give a damn about from Saddaam, it was about protecting the spigots that lead into the vast oil aquifer shared by Iraq and Kuwait. If it weren't for that original oil war, then Saddaam would not have been on our shitlist after 9/11 and would still be in power now. He would probably be currying favor with the US by letting us send captured Al Queda types to his torture dungeons for 'clean hands' interrogation.
in their entirety a second time.
And the loss of customer trust caused by the breach will reverberate throughout the company. Loss of customer trust, caused by the breach and publicised in a small article on the 12th page of the newspaper will disrupt the entire marketing campaign for the conglomerate. The image the company has strived for including customer confidence in the security procedures of MegaCorp Inc, is now tarnished and so the entire mega-millions cost of all marketing for MegaCorp Inc's products for the last 5 years will have to be included in the damage estimate. This figure will be included again in estimates for any future breaches.
So when they calculate the cost of moving a gallon of oil into baghdad they are probably calculating the cost of the Tank Escort, and all the troops in the troop carrier in the same convoy, as well as the bradley fighting vehicles and air cover. All these vehicles would be going to baghdad anyway even if they required no fuel, and air cover would still be provided to the convoy regardless of there being a fuel truck. But the entire cost of all these vehicles will be tacked onto the cost for transproting the gas as if bringing gas to baghdad were the end goal for going there. The gas truck is, in reality just tagging along.
And we probably already had the gas truck.
If you calculate the cost of maintaining a piece of military equipment and personel between wars, and then use that number as the cost incurred by using that equipment and personel *in* a war, even though the cost would have been incurred with or without the war, then you can really jack up the numbers.
If the cost of war were calculated as the cost of consumables, plus increased pay & benefits ( since we have a military regardless of whether we are fighting a war ) then it might turn out that war is cheap in terms of money...
There was a story awhile back about an exploding jawbreaker I wonder if you could make some kind of candy powered musket...
I wonder if he is actually the original poster...
Diatomaceous earth is 100% natural microscopic glass shards. Being microscopic glass shards they are an excellent insecticide. The shards pierce the insect's shell and through capilarry action, they suck out all the internal fluids drying the bug to a corpse. However, the shards are so small that humans can ingest them without fear of harm.
So if you have a garden, or some veggies or other food you want to protect from insect pests without using a substance toxic to humans and pets, sprinkle on a little diatomaceous earth. Better yet mix up some garlic powder, water and diatomaceous earth in a bottle and spray it on. Garlic kills bugz too w/o being dangerous for ppl.
[kidding]And tie it in loosely with Herbert's Dune Series. Have some drug on a sandy planet populated by Giant Worms be the only way to navigate. Also Hokey religion-parodies. [/kidding]
Everyone has at least one good star trek episode in them. They ought to run it like America's Funniest Animals: If we use your script ( possibly polished up by some hacks ) in an episode of the new series, Star Trek: Even Tighter Tights, then we'll send you a Tee-Shirt and $100.00
Star Trek in order from best to worst ( Items in Parens are equal to each other in 'goodness' ) (2,4),3,First Contact,(6,Space-Rainbow-Thingy,1),1,(Nemesis,5)
Once the telescope becomes useless, it seems to me that it should be considered Junk, and ripe for salvage. A private company could take it over and sell online time on it to those who want to peep into other people's windows.
As soon as I can go to the moon, I am going to build a huge LAZER and blow up the Earth. As soon as I can go to Mars, I am sending into Boy's Life for a PU31 Space Modulator.
Hes, you could calculate the SHA256 hash and know that a file was *probably* the same as a known copyrighted one, but the P2P service would have to maintain a database of hashes of all copyrighted files and take queries from each node that check on each file in their shared folder. This is alot of bandwidth when you consider all the nodes. There would have to be a way of adding new hashes to the database of unshareables too that was fair. For instance you wouldn't want to have the Church of Scientology submit the hashes of all the anit-scientology rantfiles they want censored claiming copyright violation.
Once they thought there might be minable ice to make fuel with, but now it seems to be dry as a bone. Nothing whatsoever there of use.
Sure such a person might want to strike back at society by destroying the mission, but then the right person might see it as an opportunity for redemption, and adventure.
The biggest problem would be the Earth's commitment to continue sending supplies. 'Aww they are just a bunch of murderers, let em starve' might set in if the public lost interest, although that's an incentive to keep them working on science. Not that there would be much else for them to do to stave off boredom...
It is true that people change, but parts also stay the same. Obi Wan in Ep 1 seemed like a completely different person than the Obi Wan of Ep 4,5,6. I would have liked to see circumstances change him from being one way to being like he is when he is older.
When I was talking about Mos Eisley being spare I was talking about Ep 4. I was complaining, not about the Mos Eisley of Ep 1, but about the changes to the Mos Eisley of Ep 4.Year: 2038 Headline Star Wars Episode 9 Completed. Episodes I through VI redone to remove inconsistencies ( just under nuclear disaster caused by 32 bit date rollover ) 01 Anakin is now an Ewok in all episodes 02 Jabba The Hut actually molests Princess Leia 03 ...
Seems Star Wars will never be finished..
Obi Wan's character in Episode I was probably the worst thing about the movie other than Jar Jar Binks. The guy should have been identifiable as the same Obi Wan we all knew. He was just Qui Gon Jin's 'Igor-like' monk.
In AOTC, Anakin is a badly acted whining little baby. Lucas should have hired a real writer to develop him into a believeable Darth Vader precursor. Anakin, being so important in all the movies really needs to be real.
Lucas needs to make it less gawdy. The scenes in Mos Eisley were spare - almost desolate, which is what you would expect for a desert planet in the middle of nowhere. Then Lucas adds extra computer generated stuff to it. The desert planet in the middle of nowhere that was so boring Luke couldn't wait to leave now seemed like a happening place which detracted from the movie.
The battles in episodes I and II are dazzlingly detailed. Rather than showing all that detail all the time just because he can, he needs to stop and consider what would actually be there and leave most of the things out that don't have a purpose. Less detail is sometimes more realistic IMO.