Back during the "Take the Pepsi challenge" commercials, Pepsi's entire ad campaign was focused on how much better they are then Coke. A sure sign that Coke was beating them in the marketplace.
Yes, but Coca-Cola was beating them in the marketplace. Coke enjoyed a larger market share (always has, to this day). The "Take the Pepsi challenge" ads were a pretty good campaign. Go ahead, try some. You might like it. It only costs you a can of soda.
That doesn't work in the arena of corporate computing. Migrating a network over to a different OS costs thousands or millions of dollars. Linux has to make a compelling case for dramatically lower costs, or else few will risk changing over--the cost of failure is prohibitively high.
People who will test a ninety-five cent can of cola would be loathe to sink a quarter million into a spontaneous server deployment. Microsoft just has to keep muddying the waters--"Your IIS deployment finally mostly works--are you going to risk switching to Linux, especially when we say it's more expensive?"
used to work for a large corporation that was failing. It was being taken apart and broken up by the banks and its creditors. Every week we had the same press releases.
Your large, failing corporation probably didn't have forty billion or so dollars in the bank...that kind of cushion does tend to buy a corporation some breathing room.
Then, IBM stands for reliability and predictability...
In part, this is because of their own very effective FUD campaigns a couple of decades ago. The acronym FUD was originally created in response to IBM's tactics.
They're a solid player now and I believe they are in general very trustworthy--but you have to remember where they came from. They were the Microsoft of their era. It's nice to see them embracing Linux and so forth, and I'm going to be thrilled to see them crush SCO...but IBM has shown its dark side in the past.
I'm unsure if it could be automated, either by analyzing the site with a robot, or through analyzing the manual white-listing done by the users of your blocker software. Otherwise it would have to be a manual process...
Or you could switch to Opera. The Quick Preferences menu (F12) offers four settings with regard to popups:
Accept pop-up windows
Refuse pop-up windows
Open pop-up windows in background
Open requested pop-up windows only
The 'open requested pop-up windows only' setting will open only one pop-up at a time--not a nested series of them--and then only in response to an actual click. So clicking on the 'Change Password' link on your corporate intranet will open the popup that you're looking for, but the advertising popups are eliminated.
It may be necessary to tweak your web site implementation, however. The user does still have to do something to indicated that they want to receive a popup, but it's not very painful. Just a thought...
Space exploration can be expensive. Thats the nature of the game.
But the rewards from the information that little teaspoon of starstuff might contain, well, thats beyond measure. You can't put a price tag on how valuable that is.
Missing the joke: Priceless!
Re:"grok" is from "Stranger in a Strange Land"
on
The Voice of Groklaw
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I also personally believe that "geek" is Martian for "terribly attractive".
Main Entry:
geek
Pronunciation: 'gEk
Function: noun
Etymology: probably from English dialect geek, geck fool, from Low German geck, from Middle Low German
Date: 1914 1 : a carnival performer often billed as a wild man whose act usually includes biting the head off a live chicken or snake ...
Actually, it's English for someone who bites the heads off live chickens. I suppose some people might find that terribly attractive. Or at least attractively terrible. Or something.
This requires artificial light at night, and thus you are never going to get rid of the light that metroplexs produce.
You can't get rid of it completely, true. However light pollution can certainly be curtailed. Proper full-cutoff light fixtures ensure that more light is directed downward on to the street--where it does some good--rather than up to the sky--where it annoys astronomers.
Hawaii is not exactly uninhabited, but they make regular and concerted efforts to limit light pollution because of the observatories on Mauna Kea. As an added bonus, reducing light pollution saves energy--those expensive photons end up directed mostly where they are needed, rather than being lost.
My aunt and uncle were driving through Toronto a few years ago. It was fairly late in the evening. They were on the 401 by the airport, where the 403 merges in and there's about eight lanes in each direction. Traffic was (fortunately) quite light.
In front of them, a car was weaving back and forth, clearly unable to stay in its lane. At first, they were speculating as to whether or not the driver was sober. Eventually, they were able to pass the dangerous driver.
She was steering with her elbows and knitting.
In Ontario the Highway Traffic Act describes a number of different offenses, including "reckless driving". It's sort of a catch-all that lets the police ticket or arrest individuals who are doing incredibly stupid things that aren't necessarily specifically described in law. (Sort of a "too-dangerously-stupid-to-drive" offense.) Do other jurisdictions not have similar statutes? Why not?
Actually, they should just enact a law that states that while driving a car, your attention should be focused on (duh!) *driving the car*
I'll make your neurosurgeon aware of that when the attending tries to call his cell for advice re: the catscan of your shattered neck.
Interesting, but this is why on-call physicians carry pagers. Doctors are often doing things that they can't drop at an instant's notice. (If the neurosurgeon is operating on your shattered neck, would you want him to drop his scalpel and answer his cell phone?) If a physician gets a page, then they put down what they're doing in a controlled manner, and calls back as soon as is reasonably appropriate.
The neurosurgeon can pull over to the side of the road or into a driveway, and then do a consult. As an aside, who reads a CT scan over the phone--and would you want someone do to a neuro consult while they're distracted by driving? Who reads the neurosurgeon's CT scan after he crashes into a bridge embankment?
Telephone polls are meaningless vehicles for polling agencies to generate meaningless statistics to sell to whoever's paying their bill. Aside from potentially swaying people that are on the fence and whose minds are as maleable as chewed bubble gum, in my experience telephone polls aren't used as conclusive findings... but as rough indicators and estimates of the current state of whatever issue is being polled.
Quite. Aside from the confounding factors of even 'honest' polling, so-called 'push' polls are also carried out, that are designed to (ahem) encourage a particular viewpoint. My favourite fictional example is from the British television series, Yes, Prime Minister. (National Service is a fictional program requiring a couple of years of military service from all young people.)
Sir Humphrey: You know what happens: a nice young lady comes up to you. Obviously you want to create a good impression, you don't want to look a fool, do you? So she starts asking you some questions: Mr. Woolley, are you worried about the number of young people without jobs? Bernard Woolley: Yes. Sir Humphrey: Are you worried about the rise in crime among teenagers? Bernard Woolley: Yes. Sir Humphrey: Do you think there is a lack of discipline in our Comprehensive schools? Bernard Woolley: Yes. Sir Humphrey: Do you think young people welcome some authority and leadership in their lives? Bernard Woolley: Yes. Sir Humphrey: Do you think they respond to a challenge? Bernard Woolley: Yes. Sir Humphrey: Would you be in favour of reintroducing National Service? Bernard Woolley: Oh, well, I suppose I might be. Sir Humphrey: Yes or no? Bernard Woolley: Yes. Sir Humphrey: Of course you would, Bernard. After all you said you can't say no to that. So they don't mention the first five questions and they publish the last one. Bernard Woolley: Is that really what they do? Sir Humphrey: Well, not the reputable ones no, but there aren't many of those. So alternatively the young lady can get the opposite result. Bernard Woolley: How? Sir Humphrey: Mr. Woolley, are you worried about the danger of war? Bernard Woolley: Yes. Sir Humphrey: Are you worried about the growth of armaments? Bernard Woolley: Yes. Sir Humphrey: Do you think there is a danger in giving young people guns and teaching them how to kill? Bernard Woolley: Yes. Sir Humphrey: Do you think it is wrong to force people to take up arms against their will? Bernard Woolley: Yes. Sir Humphrey: Would you oppose the reintroduction of National Service? Bernard Woolley: Yes! Sir Humphrey: There you are, you see Bernard. The perfect balanced sample.
The previous government in Ontario used push polls to further its education agenda. Poll questions included "Breaking contracts is OK as teachers have had it too good for too long (yes or no)?" or "To cut education spending, would you increase class size, reduce class time, or cut salaries by 5%?" (The provincial government was hoping to garner support for reopening signed contracts to strip teacher salary and benefits.) Push polls are quite popular elsewhere, too, I'm sure.
Special thanks to Kieran Healy for the Yes, Prime Ministerquote.
wish people would quit spouting out the crap about "above human eye limits". There is no such thing. We don't know what the maximum frame rate that the eye can see is.
Others have noted that the eye is an analog device, and so the notion of a 'frame rate' is absurd for that reason. Fair enough. Still, there's a limit to how fast the receptors in the human eye can 'refresh' themselves. Light shining on the eye triggers reversible chemical reactions; the rate at which the receptors can be restored to their unstimulated state after exposure to light arguably places an upper limit on the eye's 'frame rate'. In getting that signal to the brain, again a number of reversible reactions take place, all of which may impose an upper limit on your vision 'refresh rate'.
For those that are interested, there's not a bad description of the entire process in point form here, as well as a more detailed description of phototransduction (what happens when photons strike the retina) here. A diagram of the phototranduction cascade is here.
Lets start with the Saturn V rocket. The thing was designed by the Huntsville Germans. When you think of German engineers, think meticulously designed and crafted, expensive as heck, and reliable. Did they ever lose a Saturn (Saturn V or Saturn Ib) in flight? Titan was much cheaper than Saturn but hasn't had quite the same record.
Well, the first stage was designed largely by the Germans. They built it simple, reliable, and strong. The original design for the Saturn V first stage (the S-1C) called for four F1 engines. When this was later bumped up to add a fifth engine, engineers found that the structure was sufficiently beefy that little extra bracing was needed. It was fuelled by kerosene (JP-1) and liquid oxygen. It was simple, rock-solid, sturdy, and reliable. It was a truly beautiful monster, and it did its job admirably.
North American designed the second stage (the Saturn S-II). Since the S-II stayed with the rocket longer and higher, weight was much more important. Liquid hydrogen had to be used for its higher energy density than kerosene. Traditional rugged German rocket engineering would have made the S-II solid, reliable--and too heavy to fly. The S-II components were designed to bear a load precisely 1.5 times the load anticipated in flight. Parts that were too strong were shaved down and tested until they failed at exactly 1.5, so as to save every ounce of weight.
Probably the biggest engineering challenge of the S-II was construction of its common bulkhead between the liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen tanks. Despite both being cryogenic liquids, in use they're about seventy degrees (Celsius) apart in temperature. Usually this was a nonissue: the top of one tank and the bottom of the other were hemispherical, and met at only a single point. Unfortunately, such construction added weight, so for the S-II (and for the third stage, the S-IVB) a common bulkhead design was used, where a single hemisphere formed the wall between the two tanks. Entirely new techniques had to be developed to assemble the structure--miles of perfect welds were required; the metal was shaped by being pounded into a mold with explosives. And they had to do it twice for each S-II--two thin hemispheres of aluminum sandwiched a layer of insulation to make the bulkhead. Absolutely phenomenal, and way beyond anything that the Germans (or anyone else) had done before that point.
Anyway, IANAA (I am not an American) but I hate to see all of the engineers at North American Aviation and Boeing (for the S-IVB) get shrugged off--the Germans were instrumental without question in the early US space program, but credit where credit is due...the S-II and the S-IVB worked absolutely perfectly (to my knowledge) throughout the Apollo program. (Almost--a single J-2 engine of the five on the S-II failed to ignite on Apollo 13. This alone had no impact on the mission, and certainly was the smallest issue that 13 faced.)
Oh, and Apollo had redundant space crafts so even when the Service Module was blown to shreds (as a result of ground handling to empty a balky oxygen tank by running tank heaters until the insulation burned off), they brought back to crew, although one guy had a 103 F plus fever from a urinary infection because he didn't think they had enough electric power for him to take a leak often enough.
The redundant spacecraft didn't exist because NASA anticipated a possible accident (explosion of the service module) and supply an extra spaceship. There was a second ship present because the mission required it--the only way the Americans could get to the moon on a short schedule was by leaving most of the craft (command and service modules) in orbit, and landing the smallest ship possible--the lunar module. It was a lucky coincidence that Apollo 13 could use the lunar module in that way, and even then, it wasn't really designed with a 'lifeboat' capacity in mind. A favourite example is in the case of the ship's scrubbers--lithium hydroxide canister
I have to hand it to you--that's absolutely brilliant.:) If only I had mod points...I just seeded half a dozen flasks with HeLa cells before sitting down to Slashdot.
I didn't read the article but...
Just publiclly annouce that people have 30-60 days to prove whats theirs and why it's there. Anything that isn't claimed is gone.
Why doesn't anybody ever read the article?
So the city is placing public notices in newspapers, describing the various mystery cables and giving their owners 90 days to come forward.
"No one responds, we cut them," says Li Zhenjun, who oversees the regulatory efforts. "We can't just have people putting up wires at their leisure.''
Someone please mod this up! This is precisely the comment I was going to make. You can have a world with a science fiction flavour where there are restrictions on the technology available. You don't have to have weapons of mass destruction, and you still have room for cleverness, traps, misdirection...and bullet time Bene Gesserit combat.
Now that it's established that in fact it was legal, Bunner et al. should be able to have the decision vacated. (Shame on that judge.)
Decisions reached in a Norwegian court by a Norwegian jurist don't set precedent or have standing in courts in other countries.
A US judge could choose to consider decisions made in other jurisdictions, but he or she is by no means bound to do so. My (and your) opinions aside, the fact that Jon did nothing illegal in Norway does not guarantee that Andrew Bunner did nothing illegal in California.
The only PRACTICAL solution is to PRINT the ballot in human readable form. There would be no pure electronic count. The voter would verify their choices using the printout, NOT the screen. An incorrect ballot would be shredded and the voter could then change their selections.
Close, but not quite. Spoiled ballots can't be shredded--that can create the opportunity for ballots to go "missing".
In Canada, each polling station receives a certain number of ballots, and must return the same number. Spoiled ballots are held separately, but are not discarded. I would hope that other locales using paper ballots work the same way.
When we finally see sub-$1 per kg "launch" costs, it will be because we've finally built a series of space elevators around the equator, and that (unfortunately) takes a metric buttload of international redtape.
Even with a space elevator, we're not going to see sub $1/kg launch costs. Going from the Earth's surface to geosynchronous orbit straight up a vertical cable will cost you about 50 MJ (megajoules) per kg. That's a bit more than 14 kWh, so even at 100% efficiency, just the electricity for the trip would have to cost less than 7 cents per kWh to break the $1/kg barrier. Yes, you could probably recover some energy from the cargo coming back down, but still.... And this leaves out any thought of recouping the capital costs of the elevator, or paying for any maintenance.
On the other hand, bear in mind that people still regularly pay five or ten dollars per kg for an airline to fly them from London to New York. (Depending on their mass.) Dropping the price to orbit to $25/kg would be enough to really impress me--and is still a high enough price to sound credible. (Remember, bean counters often avoid Linux because, hey, how good could something so inexpensive be?)
Spot on! In my post I just wanted to address the issue of absurd overclocking from the standpoint of an inability to propagate information across the chip that quickly. (Not to say that this renders those clock speeds impossible; it just wouldn't work if the chip isn't designed for it.) It seemed the simplest way to explain why it wasn't possible to have a 15 GHz P4.
I'm glad you brought up the materials science issues, which (I agree with you) are the limits you smack into first in this problem. My undergrad solid state physics courses have receded into merciful oblivion--and it's nice to hear from someone who does this for a living.
And so it goes with the lower you go. At -100C you could probably keep your 3GHz PC up at around the 14GHz area, which is way faster than anything on the market. Isn't it worth the money on cooling to experience a slice of tomorrow?
This works to a point...but there are physical limits to how fast a present-day chip can be overclocked. Aside from potential limits on how fast gates can switch inside the chips, you start running into concerns about things like the speed of light.
At a hypothetical 15 GHz, light will travel 2 centimetres (about 0.8 inches) per clock cycle. The Pentium 4 die is about 1.7 cm on a side, with a 2.1 cm diagonal. If one corner of the chip needs to talk to the other corner of the chip, it will take a minimum of two clock cycles just for the signal to travel there and back--and that neglects the fact that electrons move slower than light. You can bet that Intel's designers didn't anticipate those kinds of timing issues.
So you might be able to clock a 3 GHz chip to 4 or 4.5 GHz with this setup, and do so much more stably with less wear and tear on the chip--but you're not going to be able to scale the chip's speed to 10 or 15 GHz.
One of the defenses I've heard from GPL advocates regarding the SCO scandal is that SCO "gifted" their code because they didn't pull their Linux distribution right away. From what you're saying, it sounds like that wouldn't be the case. However, does that imply that SCO or any other contributer could pull their code since they choose not to abide by the license anymore, either?
Okay, there's two important points here. First, by distributing under the GPL the code to which they now claim copyright, SCO must now either
agree that the code so released is under the GPL--in which case, it was "gifted", or
admit that they distributed GPL'd code under a different license. If they go that route, then they have infringed copyright--all the other contributors to Linux have only made their code available under the terms and conditions of the GPL. In that case, then they are liable for all kinds of damages.
...but actually, I believe that their current set of claims revolves around the legal theory that IBM incorporated code (now purportedly owned by SCO) into Linux and distributed it under the GPL without SCO's permission. (SCO is also somewhat absurdly attacking the constitutionality of the GPL, but that's a whole other can of worms.)
Point two: can a contributor pull their code? Nope. Once you've released it under the GPL, it can't be withdrawn. If I buy a piece of software from Microsoft, and in good faith act in accordance with all of its licensing provisions, Microsoft can't turn around and say, "Nope, you should give that back to us. We'd like to change the licensing terms now." The original writer of the code (or the owner of its copyright) is perfectly welcome to relicense the code and distribute it under another license. He or she can sell it (or its derivatives) under a closed-source license. (Nobody but the owner of the copyright can distribute closed source variations, because everybody else must distribute under the GPL.)
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but Coca-Cola was beating them in the marketplace. Coke enjoyed a larger market share (always has, to this day). The "Take the Pepsi challenge" ads were a pretty good campaign. Go ahead, try some. You might like it. It only costs you a can of soda.
That doesn't work in the arena of corporate computing. Migrating a network over to a different OS costs thousands or millions of dollars. Linux has to make a compelling case for dramatically lower costs, or else few will risk changing over--the cost of failure is prohibitively high.
People who will test a ninety-five cent can of cola would be loathe to sink a quarter million into a spontaneous server deployment. Microsoft just has to keep muddying the waters--"Your IIS deployment finally mostly works--are you going to risk switching to Linux, especially when we say it's more expensive?"
Your large, failing corporation probably didn't have forty billion or so dollars in the bank...that kind of cushion does tend to buy a corporation some breathing room.
In part, this is because of their own very effective FUD campaigns a couple of decades ago. The acronym FUD was originally created in response to IBM's tactics.
They're a solid player now and I believe they are in general very trustworthy--but you have to remember where they came from. They were the Microsoft of their era. It's nice to see them embracing Linux and so forth, and I'm going to be thrilled to see them crush SCO...but IBM has shown its dark side in the past.
Or you could switch to Opera. The Quick Preferences menu (F12) offers four settings with regard to popups:
Accept pop-up windows
Refuse pop-up windows
Open pop-up windows in background
Open requested pop-up windows only
The 'open requested pop-up windows only' setting will open only one pop-up at a time--not a nested series of them--and then only in response to an actual click. So clicking on the 'Change Password' link on your corporate intranet will open the popup that you're looking for, but the advertising popups are eliminated.
It may be necessary to tweak your web site implementation, however. The user does still have to do something to indicated that they want to receive a popup, but it's not very painful. Just a thought...
Bummer, dude.
I mean, grad school's been rough for me, too, but I never get hit by meteorites.
Retrieving genuine comet dust: $200 million .
Missing the joke: Priceless!Cheers to Merriam-Webster.
I would prefer to be a nerd--at least they make better eating.
You can't get rid of it completely, true. However light pollution can certainly be curtailed. Proper full-cutoff light fixtures ensure that more light is directed downward on to the street--where it does some good--rather than up to the sky--where it annoys astronomers.
Hawaii is not exactly uninhabited, but they make regular and concerted efforts to limit light pollution because of the observatories on Mauna Kea. As an added bonus, reducing light pollution saves energy--those expensive photons end up directed mostly where they are needed, rather than being lost.
In front of them, a car was weaving back and forth, clearly unable to stay in its lane. At first, they were speculating as to whether or not the driver was sober. Eventually, they were able to pass the dangerous driver.
She was steering with her elbows and knitting.
In Ontario the Highway Traffic Act describes a number of different offenses, including "reckless driving". It's sort of a catch-all that lets the police ticket or arrest individuals who are doing incredibly stupid things that aren't necessarily specifically described in law. (Sort of a "too-dangerously-stupid-to-drive" offense.) Do other jurisdictions not have similar statutes? Why not?
Interesting, but this is why on-call physicians carry pagers. Doctors are often doing things that they can't drop at an instant's notice. (If the neurosurgeon is operating on your shattered neck, would you want him to drop his scalpel and answer his cell phone?) If a physician gets a page, then they put down what they're doing in a controlled manner, and calls back as soon as is reasonably appropriate.
The neurosurgeon can pull over to the side of the road or into a driveway, and then do a consult. As an aside, who reads a CT scan over the phone--and would you want someone do to a neuro consult while they're distracted by driving? Who reads the neurosurgeon's CT scan after he crashes into a bridge embankment?
Quite. Aside from the confounding factors of even 'honest' polling, so-called 'push' polls are also carried out, that are designed to (ahem) encourage a particular viewpoint. My favourite fictional example is from the British television series, Yes, Prime Minister. (National Service is a fictional program requiring a couple of years of military service from all young people.)
The previous government in Ontario used push polls to further its education agenda. Poll questions included "Breaking contracts is OK as teachers have had it too good for too long (yes or no)?" or "To cut education spending, would you increase class size, reduce class time, or cut salaries by 5%?" (The provincial government was hoping to garner support for reopening signed contracts to strip teacher salary and benefits.) Push polls are quite popular elsewhere, too, I'm sure.Special thanks to Kieran Healy for the Yes, Prime Minister quote.
Others have noted that the eye is an analog device, and so the notion of a 'frame rate' is absurd for that reason. Fair enough. Still, there's a limit to how fast the receptors in the human eye can 'refresh' themselves. Light shining on the eye triggers reversible chemical reactions; the rate at which the receptors can be restored to their unstimulated state after exposure to light arguably places an upper limit on the eye's 'frame rate'. In getting that signal to the brain, again a number of reversible reactions take place, all of which may impose an upper limit on your vision 'refresh rate'.
For those that are interested, there's not a bad description of the entire process in point form here, as well as a more detailed description of phototransduction (what happens when photons strike the retina) here. A diagram of the phototranduction cascade is here.
See, it's that kind of anti-capitalist suppression of consumption that tells me that the terrorists have already won.
Shame on you.
Oh, and happy new year!
Well, the first stage was designed largely by the Germans. They built it simple, reliable, and strong. The original design for the Saturn V first stage (the S-1C) called for four F1 engines. When this was later bumped up to add a fifth engine, engineers found that the structure was sufficiently beefy that little extra bracing was needed. It was fuelled by kerosene (JP-1) and liquid oxygen. It was simple, rock-solid, sturdy, and reliable. It was a truly beautiful monster, and it did its job admirably.
North American designed the second stage (the Saturn S-II). Since the S-II stayed with the rocket longer and higher, weight was much more important. Liquid hydrogen had to be used for its higher energy density than kerosene. Traditional rugged German rocket engineering would have made the S-II solid, reliable--and too heavy to fly. The S-II components were designed to bear a load precisely 1.5 times the load anticipated in flight. Parts that were too strong were shaved down and tested until they failed at exactly 1.5, so as to save every ounce of weight.
Probably the biggest engineering challenge of the S-II was construction of its common bulkhead between the liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen tanks. Despite both being cryogenic liquids, in use they're about seventy degrees (Celsius) apart in temperature. Usually this was a nonissue: the top of one tank and the bottom of the other were hemispherical, and met at only a single point. Unfortunately, such construction added weight, so for the S-II (and for the third stage, the S-IVB) a common bulkhead design was used, where a single hemisphere formed the wall between the two tanks. Entirely new techniques had to be developed to assemble the structure--miles of perfect welds were required; the metal was shaped by being pounded into a mold with explosives. And they had to do it twice for each S-II--two thin hemispheres of aluminum sandwiched a layer of insulation to make the bulkhead. Absolutely phenomenal, and way beyond anything that the Germans (or anyone else) had done before that point.
Anyway, IANAA (I am not an American) but I hate to see all of the engineers at North American Aviation and Boeing (for the S-IVB) get shrugged off--the Germans were instrumental without question in the early US space program, but credit where credit is due...the S-II and the S-IVB worked absolutely perfectly (to my knowledge) throughout the Apollo program. (Almost--a single J-2 engine of the five on the S-II failed to ignite on Apollo 13. This alone had no impact on the mission, and certainly was the smallest issue that 13 faced.)
Oh, and Apollo had redundant space crafts so even when the Service Module was blown to shreds (as a result of ground handling to empty a balky oxygen tank by running tank heaters until the insulation burned off), they brought back to crew, although one guy had a 103 F plus fever from a urinary infection because he didn't think they had enough electric power for him to take a leak often enough.
The redundant spacecraft didn't exist because NASA anticipated a possible accident (explosion of the service module) and supply an extra spaceship. There was a second ship present because the mission required it--the only way the Americans could get to the moon on a short schedule was by leaving most of the craft (command and service modules) in orbit, and landing the smallest ship possible--the lunar module. It was a lucky coincidence that Apollo 13 could use the lunar module in that way, and even then, it wasn't really designed with a 'lifeboat' capacity in mind. A favourite example is in the case of the ship's scrubbers--lithium hydroxide canister
I have to hand it to you--that's absolutely brilliant. :) If only I had mod points...I just seeded half a dozen flasks with HeLa cells before sitting down to Slashdot.
You're thinking of Garfield. ;)
Then again, fat, lazy, and decidedly unaerodynamic may not be the best traits to associate with a spacecraft...
Just publiclly annouce that people have 30-60 days to prove whats theirs and why it's there. Anything that isn't claimed is gone.
Why doesn't anybody ever read the article?
Someone please mod this up! This is precisely the comment I was going to make. You can have a world with a science fiction flavour where there are restrictions on the technology available. You don't have to have weapons of mass destruction, and you still have room for cleverness, traps, misdirection...and bullet time Bene Gesserit combat.
Decisions reached in a Norwegian court by a Norwegian jurist don't set precedent or have standing in courts in other countries.
A US judge could choose to consider decisions made in other jurisdictions, but he or she is by no means bound to do so. My (and your) opinions aside, the fact that Jon did nothing illegal in Norway does not guarantee that Andrew Bunner did nothing illegal in California.
Close, but not quite. Spoiled ballots can't be shredded--that can create the opportunity for ballots to go "missing".
In Canada, each polling station receives a certain number of ballots, and must return the same number. Spoiled ballots are held separately, but are not discarded. I would hope that other locales using paper ballots work the same way.
Even with a space elevator, we're not going to see sub $1/kg launch costs. Going from the Earth's surface to geosynchronous orbit straight up a vertical cable will cost you about 50 MJ (megajoules) per kg. That's a bit more than 14 kWh, so even at 100% efficiency, just the electricity for the trip would have to cost less than 7 cents per kWh to break the $1/kg barrier. Yes, you could probably recover some energy from the cargo coming back down, but still.... And this leaves out any thought of recouping the capital costs of the elevator, or paying for any maintenance.
On the other hand, bear in mind that people still regularly pay five or ten dollars per kg for an airline to fly them from London to New York. (Depending on their mass.) Dropping the price to orbit to $25/kg would be enough to really impress me--and is still a high enough price to sound credible. (Remember, bean counters often avoid Linux because, hey, how good could something so inexpensive be?)
1) Material science....
2) Non-Linearity of operation....
Spot on! In my post I just wanted to address the issue of absurd overclocking from the standpoint of an inability to propagate information across the chip that quickly. (Not to say that this renders those clock speeds impossible; it just wouldn't work if the chip isn't designed for it.) It seemed the simplest way to explain why it wasn't possible to have a 15 GHz P4.
I'm glad you brought up the materials science issues, which (I agree with you) are the limits you smack into first in this problem. My undergrad solid state physics courses have receded into merciful oblivion--and it's nice to hear from someone who does this for a living.
Yeah, that's an excellent point. As a physicist, I should have been more precise. It's a nitpick, but it's a good nitpick. :)
This works to a point...but there are physical limits to how fast a present-day chip can be overclocked. Aside from potential limits on how fast gates can switch inside the chips, you start running into concerns about things like the speed of light.
At a hypothetical 15 GHz, light will travel 2 centimetres (about 0.8 inches) per clock cycle. The Pentium 4 die is about 1.7 cm on a side, with a 2.1 cm diagonal. If one corner of the chip needs to talk to the other corner of the chip, it will take a minimum of two clock cycles just for the signal to travel there and back--and that neglects the fact that electrons move slower than light. You can bet that Intel's designers didn't anticipate those kinds of timing issues.
So you might be able to clock a 3 GHz chip to 4 or 4.5 GHz with this setup, and do so much more stably with less wear and tear on the chip--but you're not going to be able to scale the chip's speed to 10 or 15 GHz.
Okay, there's two important points here. First, by distributing under the GPL the code to which they now claim copyright, SCO must now either
agree that the code so released is under the GPL--in which case, it was "gifted", or
admit that they distributed GPL'd code under a different license. If they go that route, then they have infringed copyright--all the other contributors to Linux have only made their code available under the terms and conditions of the GPL. In that case, then they are liable for all kinds of damages.
Point two: can a contributor pull their code? Nope. Once you've released it under the GPL, it can't be withdrawn. If I buy a piece of software from Microsoft, and in good faith act in accordance with all of its licensing provisions, Microsoft can't turn around and say, "Nope, you should give that back to us. We'd like to change the licensing terms now." The original writer of the code (or the owner of its copyright) is perfectly welcome to relicense the code and distribute it under another license. He or she can sell it (or its derivatives) under a closed-source license. (Nobody but the owner of the copyright can distribute closed source variations, because everybody else must distribute under the GPL.)