Think about what you're proposing. The river temp is likely in the 80s, and the air temp is in the 100+ range for the last two weeks. A radiator only exchanges heat (in this case warming the water, rather than cooling it). It doesn't cool the source flowing through the radiator unless the temperature outside the radiator is cooler than inside.
End effect: You end up with water that's even warmer than before.
Yes, but the space shuttles still rely on five IBM AP-101 (about as powerful as an 80286 processor) machines for their flight guidance. However, the code has been thoroughly vetted on those machines, and the cost of switching to more modern processors and re-vetting the code, along with the risk that hey, it didn't work right! is prohibitive.
Sometimes the legacy solutions are best left alone.
both public and personal. In addition to being able to help point several people toward resources to help them with the same or similar problems, I also discovered that I'm apparently about to become extremely wealthy from the displaced sons and daughters of several different Nigerian dictators, who need me to help them transfer their money to the USA!
-Mike
The clathrates of which you speak form at the edge of the continental shelves. Considering the total area and volume of the seas, it shouldn't be too difficult to simply avoid these areas.
Perhaps an expert in fuels or oceanography can answer this: does the condensation of gas hydrates chart geometrically with declining temperature (above freezing, obviously), or is there a phase transition where their growth suddenly expands?
Also, although tropical waters are certainly warmer at the surface than temperate or arctic waters, I feel pretty safe in believing that a few hundred meters down, they still end up being just a few degrees above freezing.
I'm not a speed-reader by the formal definition, but I do scan in advance of what I'm reading in order to absorb data faster. Sometimes, though, that facility in my brain that interprets what I'm scanning gets it wrong.
Thus, when I first read "And can these robots still recognize their mirror selves if we secretly place a goatee on them", what I saw was:
"And can these robots still recognize their mirror selves if we secretly place goatse on them?"
Boy, now there's a disturbing image.
I, for one, do not welcome our new metallic goatse overlords.
Re:In Related News
on
Java Is So 90s
·
· Score: 4, Funny
The first code I ever wrote that had an actual purpose was in BASIC:
10 for i = 1 to 100
20 print "I will not talk in class."
30 next
Darned straight. I wrote the eqlist and maproom pages for the website of SlothMUD (my favorite destination for recreation), and did it entirely in Kate. These days I might open some of the files in EditPlus or something similar, but if I'm on a Linux box you and I'm coding PHP or c, you can guarantee I'm using Kate.
What I find interesting is that FC1 through 4 (and, previously, RH 6 through 9) have all installed just fine on my Linux box, but I can't get Mandrake to install at all. It sits & spins for about 30 to 60 minutes before finally admitting it just doesn't have any idea what's going on (and no, I don't have the exact error messages anymore-- it's been about 7 or 8 months since I last tried).
For my money (hah!), I'll stick with FC. At least it installs & works almost out-of-the-box for my purposes.
I'd be happy with a pdf viewer that doesn't take up to a minute to load on a 2.8ghz machine w/ 1gb RAM & a nice fast MB. As much as we complain about product bloat on/., I'm frequently amazed that we never comment on pdf (which as far as I can tell stands for Pretty Dumb Format).
Incidentally, I use Adobe's products on Windows boxes, but I also use kghostview on my linux box and still can't get reasonable load times from it.
So if MS can produce this new alternative to PDF and streamline the thing while they're at it (yeah, yeah, I know, this is MS we're talking about-- fat chance of streamlining) then let me be the first to welcome our... oh wait, they're not our new overlords...
Re:Can't blind on purpose
on
Set PHASRs On Stun
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
When I was in the US Coast Guard's basic training, we were taught that we'd probably never have to draw our weapons (except against a paper target) in the duration of our career (much like cops, I guess). However, we were also told that if we ever did have to, several things would have to follow:
We'd have to shoot, since that's the only legitimate reason for elevating the level of violence to the point of pulling the gun the first place.
We'd empty every last round in the magazine at the target
When in court defending our actions, if asked why we shot (8, 15, however many) rounds at the target, we could reply "it was all I had".
I have since gained a friend who used to work in security for a nuclear power plant, who tells me that their training is different than what I received: they fire two shots for each target, one for the head & one for the chest, then move on to the next target. Then again, they're also trained to be much better shots than we were, since all we were going through was basic training.
Humane? Not in either case, since both roles have the objective of killing the person who is trying to kill you ("If someone tries to kill you, you kill them right back!"). Effective? Beats me, I never had to pull a weapon, and my friend (who no longer works security due to a minor disability brought on a few years ago) never did either. I never even had to use a threatening tone of voice in the line of duty, let alone escalate it from there.
I like the idea, but it seems to me this would work better as a community-driven organization.
I.e., draft the requirements for certification of a product (i.e., 'it works when called from csh, GNOME, and KDE!), get Mandrake, Redhat, Novell/SuSE, and a couple of the other big names in the distro world to each contribute the use of their names by the licensing organization, and get hardware vendors interested in certification.
By having a meta-organization certify a device as compliant with the major distros and the most popular desktop(s), and being completely inflexible on the certification requirements (so that the cert org can acquire a decent reputation), we'd be able to enforce standards on hardware vendors who want to do business with us-- and just as importantly, we'd avoid the balkanization of hardware certifications that might otherwise occur, as each distro vendor offers its own sticker ("It works with distro!" slapped all over the box.. bleagh!)
On a side note, wasn't that a beautiful run-on sentence?
The reason it isn't done, is because as soon as you put out a product (CokeRipoff), and say it tastes just like Coke, you're admitting that Coke is the best. People will cease to buy your original product, Pepsi?, and buy Coke, because you are saying Coke is the good product.
In the early 1980s, Coca Cola introduced New Coke, saying its taste was closer to that of their main competitor, Pepsi Cola. As we all know, New Coke sales were abysmal, and within a few months, the original formula was brought back as Coke Classic.
If your argument were true, then Coke's advertising that New Coke tasted more like Pepsi would be an acknowledgement that Pepsi was a superior product, thus driving their legions of consumers to purchase Pepsi instead. Granted, New Coke and Pepsi only tasted alike if you had no taste buds or taste processing center in the brain, but the action your statement anticipates didn't happen. Instead of consumers being driven to Pepsi, we searched anxiously for original formula Coke, with the anxiety mounting a bit more each day until Coca Cola finally announced the end of New Coke and brought the original formula back on the market.
I couldn't find the article when I was writing my original post, but yeah, I remember the same thing-- eventually (if I remember correctly) she ended up performing surgery on herself. I dunno, even in a life or death situation I doubt I could do the same... kudos to someone like her, who took human experience to the edge of the envelope & pushed just a little harder.
About the closest comparison to something on Earth would be the South Pole researchers, who are stuck there (particularly during the southern hemisphere's winter) w/out recourse to outside help. A little research drug (no pun intended) up a timeline of events at the station. What's interesting from just a cursory review of it is the number of cases of apendicitis in the first few years of the station. There has also been at least one case of a torn knee tendon.
So in the space arena, whether it's required on ISS, on the moon, or during a Mars mission, it makes good sense to plan ahead and have something like this available. After all, even if one of the crew members is a doctor, it'd still be reasonable to be minimally invasive with any surgical procedures, and to have an expert in whatever the problem is review the proceedings back on Earth.
Re:Testament to Open Source Software Developers
on
OpenOffice Bloated?
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
I like it! Incidentally, until Google indexes this thread, the term "bloat compatible" is and will be a google whack blatt. I've tried to find one of those several times and never succeeded, so I want to offer you my congratulations for finding one without even trying!
I agree with you on this, but I also wonder what the breakdown of costs for the ongoing missions looks like. Some expenses are well in the past already (hardware and software development, testing, launch, etc), while others are ongoing (human capital, computers to analyze the incoming data, facilities in which the scientists work, office supplies for them, etc).
How many people are still actively working at least thirty hours per week on the rovers (or rather, on keeping them running on learning from the data sent back)? How does the cost of supporting them compare to the cost of developing and building the rovers? To putting them on Mars?
Anyone who knows me already knows I'm an unapologetic space-nut, so please don't view this is an attack on NASA's spending on this mission. It's not intended that way at all. I'm just curious to see how the budget pie for the mission breaks out into slices.
As a previous poster pointed out, at optimal times Mars and Earth are only 48 hours apart at 1g acceleration. Even at.38g, that's not exactly enough time for acclimitization.
Nice idea in principle though. I'd suggest it might work well for targets further away, but the reality is that anything in our solar system is only a matter of a very short time away at 1g constant acceleration (ok, flip over 1/2-way through to accelerate at 1g the other way so your velocity at your target is low enough to orbit/land safely... still, you get the idea).
Slashdot Mirror
Think about what you're proposing. The river temp is likely in the 80s, and the air temp is in the 100+ range for the last two weeks. A radiator only exchanges heat (in this case warming the water, rather than cooling it). It doesn't cool the source flowing through the radiator unless the temperature outside the radiator is cooler than inside.
End effect: You end up with water that's even warmer than before.
Yes, but the space shuttles still rely on five IBM AP-101 (about as powerful as an 80286 processor) machines for their flight guidance. However, the code has been thoroughly vetted on those machines, and the cost of switching to more modern processors and re-vetting the code, along with the risk that hey, it didn't work right! is prohibitive.
Sometimes the legacy solutions are best left alone.
both public and personal. In addition to being able to help point several people toward resources to help them with the same or similar problems, I also discovered that I'm apparently about to become extremely wealthy from the displaced sons and daughters of several different Nigerian dictators, who need me to help them transfer their money to the USA! -Mike
That wasn't about bad design though, that was about not making the site readable by text-to-voice programs.
Thank goodness that didn't say what I thought it did at first glance.
What I thought I saw was "So what happens to my penis around a magnet strong enough to lift 2 tons of elevator cargo?"
I dunno, but I predict if that idea gets out, we'll start getting a totally new brand of penis enlargment spam in our inboxes.
This is Slashdot. There's no missus to catch anyone.
The clathrates of which you speak form at the edge of the continental shelves. Considering the total area and volume of the seas, it shouldn't be too difficult to simply avoid these areas.
Perhaps an expert in fuels or oceanography can answer this: does the condensation of gas hydrates chart geometrically with declining temperature (above freezing, obviously), or is there a phase transition where their growth suddenly expands?
Also, although tropical waters are certainly warmer at the surface than temperate or arctic waters, I feel pretty safe in believing that a few hundred meters down, they still end up being just a few degrees above freezing.
Nah, that wouldn't get us to invade Ecuador. Now, if they had oil & were also hiding Bin Laden....
Pardon my going WAY off-topic here, but:
I'm not a speed-reader by the formal definition, but I do scan in advance of what I'm reading in order to absorb data faster. Sometimes, though, that facility in my brain that interprets what I'm scanning gets it wrong.
Thus, when I first read "And can these robots still recognize their mirror selves if we secretly place a goatee on them", what I saw was:
"And can these robots still recognize their mirror selves if we secretly place goatse on them?"
Boy, now there's a disturbing image.
I, for one, do not welcome our new metallic goatse overlords.
The first code I ever wrote that had an actual purpose was in BASIC:
10 for i = 1 to 10020 print "I will not talk in class."
30 next
(True story!)
No fair listing the same layer under two different descriptions!
Darned straight. I wrote the eqlist and maproom pages for the website of SlothMUD (my favorite destination for recreation), and did it entirely in Kate. These days I might open some of the files in EditPlus or something similar, but if I'm on a Linux box you and I'm coding PHP or c, you can guarantee I'm using Kate.
What I find interesting is that FC1 through 4 (and, previously, RH 6 through 9) have all installed just fine on my Linux box, but I can't get Mandrake to install at all. It sits & spins for about 30 to 60 minutes before finally admitting it just doesn't have any idea what's going on (and no, I don't have the exact error messages anymore-- it's been about 7 or 8 months since I last tried).
For my money (hah!), I'll stick with FC. At least it installs & works almost out-of-the-box for my purposes.
Just make sure to kill off a few innocents while you're at it, if you're really going to do it the Texas way.
Mods: Do what you will, but please don't mod this (my) post as funny. Ironic, yes, but this is not funny.
If you refuse to cause problems[...]
I do not think that word means what you think it means.
</pedant>
(For those tempted to take this post seriously: haven't you ever watched The Princess Bride?)
I'd be happy with a pdf viewer that doesn't take up to a minute to load on a 2.8ghz machine w/ 1gb RAM & a nice fast MB. As much as we complain about product bloat on /., I'm frequently amazed that we never comment on pdf (which as far as I can tell stands for Pretty Dumb Format).
Incidentally, I use Adobe's products on Windows boxes, but I also use kghostview on my linux box and still can't get reasonable load times from it.
So if MS can produce this new alternative to PDF and streamline the thing while they're at it (yeah, yeah, I know, this is MS we're talking about-- fat chance of streamlining) then let me be the first to welcome our... oh wait, they're not our new overlords...
When I was in the US Coast Guard's basic training, we were taught that we'd probably never have to draw our weapons (except against a paper target) in the duration of our career (much like cops, I guess). However, we were also told that if we ever did have to, several things would have to follow:
I have since gained a friend who used to work in security for a nuclear power plant, who tells me that their training is different than what I received: they fire two shots for each target, one for the head & one for the chest, then move on to the next target. Then again, they're also trained to be much better shots than we were, since all we were going through was basic training.
Humane? Not in either case, since both roles have the objective of killing the person who is trying to kill you ("If someone tries to kill you, you kill them right back!"). Effective? Beats me, I never had to pull a weapon, and my friend (who no longer works security due to a minor disability brought on a few years ago) never did either. I never even had to use a threatening tone of voice in the line of duty, let alone escalate it from there.
I like the idea, but it seems to me this would work better as a community-driven organization.
I.e., draft the requirements for certification of a product (i.e., 'it works when called from csh, GNOME, and KDE!), get Mandrake, Redhat, Novell/SuSE, and a couple of the other big names in the distro world to each contribute the use of their names by the licensing organization, and get hardware vendors interested in certification.
By having a meta-organization certify a device as compliant with the major distros and the most popular desktop(s), and being completely inflexible on the certification requirements (so that the cert org can acquire a decent reputation), we'd be able to enforce standards on hardware vendors who want to do business with us-- and just as importantly, we'd avoid the balkanization of hardware certifications that might otherwise occur, as each distro vendor offers its own sticker ("It works with distro!" slapped all over the box.. bleagh!)
On a side note, wasn't that a beautiful run-on sentence?
The reason it isn't done, is because as soon as you put out a product (CokeRipoff), and say it tastes just like Coke, you're admitting that Coke is the best. People will cease to buy your original product, Pepsi?, and buy Coke, because you are saying Coke is the good product.
In the early 1980s, Coca Cola introduced New Coke, saying its taste was closer to that of their main competitor, Pepsi Cola. As we all know, New Coke sales were abysmal, and within a few months, the original formula was brought back as Coke Classic.
If your argument were true, then Coke's advertising that New Coke tasted more like Pepsi would be an acknowledgement that Pepsi was a superior product, thus driving their legions of consumers to purchase Pepsi instead. Granted, New Coke and Pepsi only tasted alike if you had no taste buds or taste processing center in the brain, but the action your statement anticipates didn't happen. Instead of consumers being driven to Pepsi, we searched anxiously for original formula Coke, with the anxiety mounting a bit more each day until Coca Cola finally announced the end of New Coke and brought the original formula back on the market.
I couldn't find the article when I was writing my original post, but yeah, I remember the same thing-- eventually (if I remember correctly) she ended up performing surgery on herself. I dunno, even in a life or death situation I doubt I could do the same... kudos to someone like her, who took human experience to the edge of the envelope & pushed just a little harder.
About the closest comparison to something on Earth would be the South Pole researchers, who are stuck there (particularly during the southern hemisphere's winter) w/out recourse to outside help. A little research drug (no pun intended) up a timeline of events at the station. What's interesting from just a cursory review of it is the number of cases of apendicitis in the first few years of the station. There has also been at least one case of a torn knee tendon.
So in the space arena, whether it's required on ISS, on the moon, or during a Mars mission, it makes good sense to plan ahead and have something like this available. After all, even if one of the crew members is a doctor, it'd still be reasonable to be minimally invasive with any surgical procedures, and to have an expert in whatever the problem is review the proceedings back on Earth.
I like it! Incidentally, until Google indexes this thread, the term "bloat compatible" is and will be a google whack blatt. I've tried to find one of those several times and never succeeded, so I want to offer you my congratulations for finding one without even trying!
Do we also use pots of acid as telephones?
No, they test for that where I work.
I agree with you on this, but I also wonder what the breakdown of costs for the ongoing missions looks like. Some expenses are well in the past already (hardware and software development, testing, launch, etc), while others are ongoing (human capital, computers to analyze the incoming data, facilities in which the scientists work, office supplies for them, etc).
How many people are still actively working at least thirty hours per week on the rovers (or rather, on keeping them running on learning from the data sent back)? How does the cost of supporting them compare to the cost of developing and building the rovers? To putting them on Mars?
Anyone who knows me already knows I'm an unapologetic space-nut, so please don't view this is an attack on NASA's spending on this mission. It's not intended that way at all. I'm just curious to see how the budget pie for the mission breaks out into slices.
As a previous poster pointed out, at optimal times Mars and Earth are only 48 hours apart at 1g acceleration. Even at .38g, that's not exactly enough time for acclimitization.
Nice idea in principle though. I'd suggest it might work well for targets further away, but the reality is that anything in our solar system is only a matter of a very short time away at 1g constant acceleration (ok, flip over 1/2-way through to accelerate at 1g the other way so your velocity at your target is low enough to orbit/land safely... still, you get the idea).