It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools for his shoddy workmanship.
It is a poor craftsman that uses shoddy tools in the first place. Selecting good tools is a core skill for any craftsman.
Same thing.
The take-away: If you don't know how to use PHP to build secure systems, use some other tool. If you don't know how to use any other tool, don't try to do secure systems.
In every case, the fault is with the programmer, not PHP.
To repeat: quit blaming the language for the lack of skills of the programmer.
Programmers who are incompetent in PHP should not attempt to build secure systems with it. Those who do attempt to do so should really not be involved in making secure systems in any language, since they have demonstrated that they do not know how to assess the limitations of their tools, let alone work properly within those limitations.
It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools for his shoddy workmanship.
If in fact this was a father's grieving rant, then I agree with your sentiment. Give him space.
Unfortunately there are features in this story that suggest that this might be the beginning of a wrongful death suit against Tesla. The mention of a lawyer being involved, and therefore presumably advising the "distraught" father about what to say in public. How big a settlement might be squeezed from Tesla? If you are going for a fat settlement, then you don't need a winning case, you don't have to be able to prove anything. You just need to demonstrate that you can be a massive pain in the butt until you are paid off. Will we next be hearing comparisons between Tesla's acceleration pedal and the Ford Pinto's gas tank?
People who are truly grieving usually don't make such a public spectacle of it.
Building a case for a lawsuit against Tesla is not appropriate for a grieving father, either. But he already has his legal dog sniffing around, and one of the things they are looking at is whether they could present a case that Tesla failed to nannify their car sufficiently. Remember, in this kind of high visibility case, you don't need to have a winning argument in order to exact a fat settlement. You only need to be able to threaten that you can make enough noise to damage Tesla's reputation.
I don't own a Tesla and if I was given one I'd sell it or give it away: it doesn't fit my lifestyle. But I've been following Tesla's development. Their engineering is sound and their approach to vehicle safety is very good. But barring nannystate features like an obligatory breathalyzer before the car will start, there is no more Tesla can do to protect against the drunk driver.
Our engineering for safe and inexpensive nuclear power is excellent for every component of these complex systems.
However we need to re-engineer the humans who design, build, and run these things. A failure of the human component will eventually destroy every fission reactor, and there are multiple paths of failure. Including allowing the wrong kind of cat litter to make it past the specifications.
I am pessimistic about fission reactors.OTOH, we have been making great strides forward on wind and solar power generation, and the only remaining major problem, storing power at peak production to meet the demands of peak usage, could be handled with technologies we already know.
You are right, the Apple II did not have the equivalent of an OS. Isn't that marvelous, that those early machines worked without that overhead?
And yet CPAs were buying Apples by the truckload, because He Whose Name I Cannot Remember wrote a simple spreadsheet application that came to be called VisiCalc later on. That transformed the biggest section of the entire accounting industry and ushered in the use of PCs in the workplace.
Pretty effective computing for an underpowered 6502 machine with a lousy non-standard keyboard and external floppy drives that would put worms on every TV set within a quarter mile. Gotta love them unshielded parallel cables.
Point being, that a lot of very powerful computing can be done without a lot RAM and other stuff. You might need it, but in most cases it really isn't necessary to get the task done.
Mmm, I don't have a car analogy. But its more than likely that the computer that controls your car's engine has much less than a GB of RAM. And it almost certainly runs FORTH, too.
"640 kilobytes is more than anyone will ever need." ---Bill Gates
A gigabyte of RAM is much more than enough for any actual computer work. It of course is not sufficient for games, or for lots of eye candy, but those aren't work. Some youngsters might consider them necessities, but that is just a measure of how shallow the knowledge and wisdom pools in their brain pans happen to be. In time some of them will mature, others will collect Darwin awards, and the rest will be left on the sidelines.
I got my first computer after my 30th birthday, about a year after the Apple II came to market. It came with 8 kilobytes of RAM and I beefed it up to 16 kB, but was unable to afford the big step to 32 kB. It was a good little machine and I learned a lot from it, and put it to good use in managing a household budget, calculating bicycle gearing (I was big into customizing ten speed bikes then), and writing up procedures for my work as an ICU RN.
Circa 1980, GOTOs in early BASIC and also 6502 Assembly were appropriately used to maximize the limited resources of early desktop computers. A particularly elegant technique on the Apple II was to POKE instruction codes into the keyboard buffer and GOTO it (the Lamb technique IIRC). While the KB buffer was only something like 128 bytes, it was long enough that a GOTO to a computed destination could be built in it and, wowsa, suddenly Applesoft BASIC had a very powerful CASE emulation.
Naked GOTOs were no longer needed when disk drives replaced tape drives, and RAM grew from 4, 8, or 16 kilobytes to the incredible size of 640 kilobytes. We still used GOTOs that were clothed within Structured Programming constructs (IF-THEN, DO-UNTIL, WHILE-DO, etc) but those were tamed GOTOs. The wild, naked GOTOs became much more rare and good programmers charged with maintaining legacy software would savagely hunt them down and destroy them.
Meanwhile, Gee-Whiz BASIC (arguably the only really good thing to ever come out of Microsoft) let us replace line numbers with labels and brought about the Business BASIC revolution circa 1985.
Dijkstra first used the phrase "GOTO considered harmful" in 1968, only 3 years after BASIC was written and about 7 years before BASIC was widely used (the costs associated with moving from Big Iron using centralized card and tape readers to minicomputers with networks of remote terminals slowed BASIC's adoption.) He was talking about FORTRAN and COBOL practices. His work was part of the slowly dawning recognition that it was not sufficient to write a program that solved the problem; that you also had to write it in such a way that you could maintain it or repurpose it next month or next year. That was the dawning of what became known as structured programming practice.
Bringing this back to the present, using recursion makes a great deal of sense when time to production, long term costs of code maintenance, or repurposing are things that need to be considered.
Obviously if the code is one-off throw-away, like a tool that will be used in converting the accounting system database from warehouse inventory to just in time purchasing, then maintenance is not a consideration but neither is efficiency. Slap together whatever will work and get on to something else asap; don't take time to rework a recursion into something faster or more robust unless the software breaks on a pre-production trial run. And then look for a quick and dirty fix.
But if the code is likely to still be in use five years in the future, then write it so the poor bastard whose got to maintain it can understand it as quickly as possible. That could well mean using recursion. The same goes if chunks of the code might be re-used in some other way, say for example taking chunks from an inventory application to build a library system for maintenance manuals.
Also keep in mind that today's hardware limitations will not apply to tomorrow's problems. It is perfectly acceptable to use a recursion that you know will fail on the 20th iteration if you also are assured that there will never be a need for more than 19 iterations in the next 5 years. In other words, don't waste yourself trying to fix tomorrow's problem, which may no longer be a problem when tomorrow rolls around.
The approach being used that identifies the repulsor is a valid one. Bicycle mechanics have been using it since at least 1890 in practical work.
When truing a bicycle wheel, it makes sense to talk about the push that a spoke exerts against the ground that keeps the wheel from collapsing. While you cannot push a string, the tensile pulling forces of all the spokes toward the top of the wheel are too complex to easily analyze. But fortunately it works out that you can invert your frame of reference and then not worry about those forces since in the inverted framework those tensile pulling forces become a single push through the one spoke that opposes the sum of the vectors of all the other spokes.
A miniaturized bicycle mechanic standing on the inside surface of a wheel's rim could use this pushing vector to figure out where the hub of the wheel was. That is never done only because bicycle mechanics are big enough to eyeball the entire wheel. But scale the metaphor up....
That is what is being done here. It is an interesting study, and much more than a theoretical sleight of hand. It suggests that the Milky Way is moving away from a specific point, which they are calling the "Dipole Repulsor", but which can also be described as the Center Of The Big Empty. I did not see anything in the article that suggests that we know how far away the COTBE is, but it looks like we at least know its direction from Earth, the Solar System, and the Milky Way. That's more than we knew before.
It has long been understood that the universe is expanding like the surface of a balloon that is being inflated. This work suggests that we may now know the direction to the center of the (possibly local) universe. I'm not entirely sure of the scale of the implications... this could be on the scale of the Copernican Revolution.
With the tremendous amount of raw material on the lunar surface, intense solar power, and reactionless engines, there will not only be huge penal colonies providing cheap labor to the regolith cement factories, but habitats at the Lagrangian points and deep space probes will be built of concrete.
Do you really think all those objects in the asteroid belt are natural? Did it never occur to you that some of those near Earth orbit objects might be used by the bug eyed monsters to monitor human activities?
They probably will go after the lunar dust first.
That thing is abrasive as hell, and probably useful in some industry.
True, that.
Early lunar habitats will be built of cinderbrick and mortar made from regolith. It is very likely that a strong enough construction material can be made by simply sifting the regolith for the right size particles, adding water, and pouring the slurry into forms.
It probably won't even need to be baked. If baking is necessary, then that can be easily done in solar ovens using batch processes on a two week schedule.
I don't usually respond to AC posts, but yours is kind of cute in an ugly troll doll sort of way. Go ask your Grandma what an ugly troll doll looked like.
Unless plants are doing some form of cold fusion that has yet to be discovered, they are not producing oxygen. They are simply moving existing oxygen from one molecule to another.
Please refrain from mixing up chemistry and nuclear physics. Better yet, please refrain from posting on slashdot until you know the difference between the different fields of scientific inquiry.
I thought oxygen was heavy enough that it was only formed in supernovas? That the fusion process in normal stars could not produce elements that heavy?
Or is it that oxygen formation is now considered the borderline between what a living star can produce and what requires a supernova's environment?
I'm behind in my knowledge of astrophysics. I never got beyond reading layman level material, and for several decades I've been distracted by other things. So what is the current thinking about stellar fusion products? Does this have any implications for carbon dating, etc?
What's really funny is that this could be the truth.
Some viruses are thought to be small enough to escape the Earth's atmosphere. Bacterial spores are considerably larger, but still small enough that the panspermia hypothesis --that life on Earth was originally seeded by space-borne spores-- is a viable concept (not necessarily true, but cannot be dismissed by anything within current scientific knowledge). When you consider that the upper atmosphere is under constant bombardment by meteors, there is enough outside energy being introduced at local levels to propel even large pieces of dust, pollens, spores, and virus particles into the region where magnetospheric influences become more significant than Earth gravity.
Since lunar regolith has been collecting and probably preserving stuff for at least as long as life on Earth has existed, there might be detectable levels of viruses or even spores or possibly grains of pollen in the Moon dust. I wonder if anyone has bothered to look for that yet? I am guessing not; I doubt that anyone has even done the theoretical work to estimate the amount of bioactive substances that might be present in Moon dust.
As to Monsanto's role in all this--- yes, their corporate history demonstrates a willingness to file lawsuits whenever one of their pet plants escapes the designated plots of those who buy Monsanto's devilseed.:)
I have only a hazy memory of all this. I was 18 at the time of the disaster, and 19 or 20 when the investigation reports became public.
But what I do recall is that the weight of the nitrogen tanks and the equipment needed to monitor and maintain the nitrogen level was more than NASA was willing to do. On reflection, probably there were no off-the-shelf systems that would have met NASA's needs, and the cost and time needed to develop another custom subsystem would have been a major consideration. Cousteau had been using helium plus oxygen atmospheres in his deep sea environments and I recall that was considered, but rejected for cosmetic reasons. NASA did not want its astronauts sounding like cartoon characters in the news clips.
I had just turned 18. I was self-absorbed with all the issues of the last year of high school, I was not much for reading newspapers, and for reasons I don't now recall I had very limited access to TV news.
My initial reaction was that this had been just another worksite accident, not that much different than when a construction trench collapsed and killed three guys laying pipe. Except that this fire happened to celebrity astronauts and a high profile NASA program and a microphone recorded their final moments. It was only later, as news from the investigation became available, that I learned about the insane level of stupidity that created the fire.
I did not know, until I read this TFA, that the capsule had been mated to the rocket: early reports gave me the impression that the tragedy had occurred in a testing room. Nor did I know that the pure oxygen was at higher than atmospheric pressure. My recollection is that the reports of that time said that Apollo 1 was using pure oxygen at low PSI. It was not reported that flammables that had been declared too dangerous for the Apollo program had been reinstalled for the test. I would have remembered that. Early reports suggested that the fire had started by a static electricity spark as the astronauts moved about in the cabin.
I recall that NASA had originally rejected the N + O2 environment for some good reason (too heavy? I don't remember). And that NASA had considered using He + O2, which was being used by Cousteau in his deep sea environments, but rejected that because the astronauts would sound like the cartoon characters. So NASA went with the low pressure pure O2 because the astronauts would sound like manly men in the news reports.
The death of these astronauts was the culmination of a comedy of errors, where several different safety measures were relaxed because each group responsible for the safety of one aspect of the problem was confident that everyone else's safety protocols were sufficient.
I think someone as adept in the spook world as Snowden is would likely have a hidden stash somewhere. But that doesn't matter wrt this argument.
What matters here is that there is a very real and significant possibility that he could do something more. As long as that possibility exists, he can not be granted a blanket pardon. He could certainly be pardoned for specific offenses for past activity, but first those need to be specified by indictment, which has yet to be done.
We could argue over whether the possibility is 10% or 1% or 0.01%, but that would be foolish. You cannot completely argue away the possibility, and there can be no blanket pardon under these conditions.
Maybe a car analogy is necessary here. Obama, and every sitting President, has the power to pardon Johnny Queue Publique at any time after JQP has been accused of stealing a car. But there is no provision that would allow JQP to be pardoned for a car theft that has not yet occurred. The President cannot give anyone a free pass to steal a car tomorrow. Not even President Trump will be allowed to do that, any tweets to the contrary not withstanding.
A serious technical detail in granting pardon to Snowden is that there is no way to determine if his "crimes" are completed.
With Manning there is no question that the acts that put him in prison are done and history. With Nixon there was a similar situation, since he could not have possibly continued his illegal/unethical acts after he was removed from office. But with Snowden ----he is still sitting on a lot of material that may have all kinds of consequences if it is released, or may even be affecting events now, without being released, if he is using some of it to blackmail someone.
I'm not saying that he is doing any of that or would do any of that. I'm merely pointing out that the kind of actions that he could be brought to trial for are not necessarily complete, so a blanket pardon should not be done as yet.
I can only see two ways Snowden could be granted a pardon. Either he is brought into the USA justice system and charged with crimes ---then he could be pardoned of just those crimes, even before the trial is done. But he needs to indicted for specific crimes. Or the other way is that he could be given a blanket pardon on his deathbed, when he clearly has no ability to do anything more.
I am glad that Snowden did what he has done and in my opinion he is a true American patriot. But the very system that he has worked to fix cannot grant him a blanket pardon at this time.
Excedrin and other APC preparations have only one benefit over plain aspirin swallowed with coffee: for some people, there is a beneficial placebo effect with certain brand names. More power to them.
However to some extent the placebo effect is dependent on ignorance that you have been given a placebo, so if you used to find that Excedrin worked better than aspirin with coffee, I may have just destroyed that benefit for you. Too bad. Find another sugar pill.
Acetaminophen (paracetamol, Tyelnol) is no more effective than aspirin (acetylsalicilic acid or ASA) in pain relief, and IIRC, does not potentiate with ASA nor are the two taken together any better than either one taken alone when taken in the usual recommended adult doses. But I'm pulling that from 30 year old memories from my days as an RN so someone could check on that.
There are downsides to both acetaminophen and aspirin.
Too much acetaminophen can irreversibly damage your liver, possibly leading to death or a liver transplant. Since the stuff is indiscriminately added to a huge number of pain relief compounds, it is possible to OD without realizing it, especially for those who think that since the Excedrin they took 15 minutes ago isn't taking care of the headache, they'll just take some Tylenol now, and maybe wash it down with Alka Seltzer Plus. Bye bye, sucker! (BTW, if you are contemplating suicide, don't do it with a couple of bottles of Tylenol. For if the paramedics get to you in time to pump your stomach and save you, you will live the rest of your short miserable life without a working liver, and that is hell on you, and everyone who has to breathe the stenches you emit.)
Too much aspirin can permanently damage your hearing, or kill you in a number of different ways, or turn you into a semi vegetable through bleeding into your brain. One thing is that an early sign of a mild OD is tinnitus, which is a high pitched whine from damage to your inner ear. It is generally reversible by abstaining from more ASA for a time. So there is that warning sign for some people (but maybe not for you and maybe not all the time so don't rely on it).
Aspirin washed down with a cup of coffee is as effective as any of the fancy brand name compounds in treating migraine and the aches and pains of daily living. Caffeine definitely potentiates the analgesic effect of aspirin, while also acting directly on the blood vessels that cause migraine pain. Plain coffee is the preferred way of delivering the caffeine, since it contains a number of other drugs that also have some benefit, and because a warm solution more quickly gets into the blood stream than a cold one laden with sugar, etc. This statement is true when the possible benefits of a placebo reaction to a given brand name drug are discounted--- but we have already destroyed that placebo effect for you with this post, eh?
Bayer aspirin is generally priced twice as much, or more, than just plain aspirin, but is no different from any of the rest once it is out of the bottle. Still if you want to enhance your pain relief with a bit of placebo effect, Bayer might well work better for you than the cheap generic stuff.
Yes, Blender. It is cross platform and on an adequate platform (multicore CPU, certain GPUs) it could possibly do what is wanted. It can also be extended using Python plug-ins, so it could be further developed if necessary. Blender can also use render farm technology so it can probably scale to meet any reasonably large job, its limitation being only the number of computers you can afford to use.
Since the person(s) inquiring about this had not mentioned Blender, I can only assume that they are either too lazy or too lacking in basic Google skills to do any work themselves. Learning to use enough of Blender's interface to manage its video editing tools is not something one can do in a weekend. Learning enough Python to create any necessary plug-ins is also non-trivial. The inquirers seem to want someone to make a one-button application to do what they want. I think they have a basic misunderstanding of what Free Open Source Software is all about.
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It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools for his shoddy workmanship.
It is a poor craftsman that uses shoddy tools in the first place. Selecting good tools is a core skill for any craftsman.
Same thing.
The take-away: If you don't know how to use PHP to build secure systems, use some other tool. If you don't know how to use any other tool, don't try to do secure systems.
In every case, the fault is with the programmer, not PHP.
To repeat: quit blaming the language for the lack of skills of the programmer.
Programmers who are incompetent in PHP should not attempt to build secure systems with it. Those who do attempt to do so should really not be involved in making secure systems in any language, since they have demonstrated that they do not know how to assess the limitations of their tools, let alone work properly within those limitations.
It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools for his shoddy workmanship.
If in fact this was a father's grieving rant, then I agree with your sentiment. Give him space.
Unfortunately there are features in this story that suggest that this might be the beginning of a wrongful death suit against Tesla. The mention of a lawyer being involved, and therefore presumably advising the "distraught" father about what to say in public. How big a settlement might be squeezed from Tesla? If you are going for a fat settlement, then you don't need a winning case, you don't have to be able to prove anything. You just need to demonstrate that you can be a massive pain in the butt until you are paid off. Will we next be hearing comparisons between Tesla's acceleration pedal and the Ford Pinto's gas tank?
People who are truly grieving usually don't make such a public spectacle of it.
Building a case for a lawsuit against Tesla is not appropriate for a grieving father, either. But he already has his legal dog sniffing around, and one of the things they are looking at is whether they could present a case that Tesla failed to nannify their car sufficiently. Remember, in this kind of high visibility case, you don't need to have a winning argument in order to exact a fat settlement. You only need to be able to threaten that you can make enough noise to damage Tesla's reputation.
I don't own a Tesla and if I was given one I'd sell it or give it away: it doesn't fit my lifestyle. But I've been following Tesla's development. Their engineering is sound and their approach to vehicle safety is very good. But barring nannystate features like an obligatory breathalyzer before the car will start, there is no more Tesla can do to protect against the drunk driver.
Our engineering for safe and inexpensive nuclear power is excellent for every component of these complex systems.
However we need to re-engineer the humans who design, build, and run these things. A failure of the human component will eventually destroy every fission reactor, and there are multiple paths of failure. Including allowing the wrong kind of cat litter to make it past the specifications.
I am pessimistic about fission reactors.OTOH, we have been making great strides forward on wind and solar power generation, and the only remaining major problem, storing power at peak production to meet the demands of peak usage, could be handled with technologies we already know.
You are right, the Apple II did not have the equivalent of an OS. Isn't that marvelous, that those early machines worked without that overhead?
And yet CPAs were buying Apples by the truckload, because He Whose Name I Cannot Remember wrote a simple spreadsheet application that came to be called VisiCalc later on. That transformed the biggest section of the entire accounting industry and ushered in the use of PCs in the workplace.
Pretty effective computing for an underpowered 6502 machine with a lousy non-standard keyboard and external floppy drives that would put worms on every TV set within a quarter mile. Gotta love them unshielded parallel cables.
Point being, that a lot of very powerful computing can be done without a lot RAM and other stuff. You might need it, but in most cases it really isn't necessary to get the task done.
Mmm, I don't have a car analogy. But its more than likely that the computer that controls your car's engine has much less than a GB of RAM. And it almost certainly runs FORTH, too.
"640 kilobytes is more than anyone will ever need." ---Bill Gates
A gigabyte of RAM is much more than enough for any actual computer work. It of course is not sufficient for games, or for lots of eye candy, but those aren't work. Some youngsters might consider them necessities, but that is just a measure of how shallow the knowledge and wisdom pools in their brain pans happen to be. In time some of them will mature, others will collect Darwin awards, and the rest will be left on the sidelines.
I got my first computer after my 30th birthday, about a year after the Apple II came to market. It came with 8 kilobytes of RAM and I beefed it up to 16 kB, but was unable to afford the big step to 32 kB. It was a good little machine and I learned a lot from it, and put it to good use in managing a household budget, calculating bicycle gearing (I was big into customizing ten speed bikes then), and writing up procedures for my work as an ICU RN.
I was there.
Circa 1980, GOTOs in early BASIC and also 6502 Assembly were appropriately used to maximize the limited resources of early desktop computers. A particularly elegant technique on the Apple II was to POKE instruction codes into the keyboard buffer and GOTO it (the Lamb technique IIRC). While the KB buffer was only something like 128 bytes, it was long enough that a GOTO to a computed destination could be built in it and, wowsa, suddenly Applesoft BASIC had a very powerful CASE emulation.
Naked GOTOs were no longer needed when disk drives replaced tape drives, and RAM grew from 4, 8, or 16 kilobytes to the incredible size of 640 kilobytes. We still used GOTOs that were clothed within Structured Programming constructs (IF-THEN, DO-UNTIL, WHILE-DO, etc) but those were tamed GOTOs. The wild, naked GOTOs became much more rare and good programmers charged with maintaining legacy software would savagely hunt them down and destroy them.
Meanwhile, Gee-Whiz BASIC (arguably the only really good thing to ever come out of Microsoft) let us replace line numbers with labels and brought about the Business BASIC revolution circa 1985.
Dijkstra first used the phrase "GOTO considered harmful" in 1968, only 3 years after BASIC was written and about 7 years before BASIC was widely used (the costs associated with moving from Big Iron using centralized card and tape readers to minicomputers with networks of remote terminals slowed BASIC's adoption.) He was talking about FORTRAN and COBOL practices. His work was part of the slowly dawning recognition that it was not sufficient to write a program that solved the problem; that you also had to write it in such a way that you could maintain it or repurpose it next month or next year. That was the dawning of what became known as structured programming practice.
Bringing this back to the present, using recursion makes a great deal of sense when time to production, long term costs of code maintenance, or repurposing are things that need to be considered.
Obviously if the code is one-off throw-away, like a tool that will be used in converting the accounting system database from warehouse inventory to just in time purchasing, then maintenance is not a consideration but neither is efficiency. Slap together whatever will work and get on to something else asap; don't take time to rework a recursion into something faster or more robust unless the software breaks on a pre-production trial run. And then look for a quick and dirty fix.
But if the code is likely to still be in use five years in the future, then write it so the poor bastard whose got to maintain it can understand it as quickly as possible. That could well mean using recursion. The same goes if chunks of the code might be re-used in some other way, say for example taking chunks from an inventory application to build a library system for maintenance manuals.
Also keep in mind that today's hardware limitations will not apply to tomorrow's problems. It is perfectly acceptable to use a recursion that you know will fail on the 20th iteration if you also are assured that there will never be a need for more than 19 iterations in the next 5 years. In other words, don't waste yourself trying to fix tomorrow's problem, which may no longer be a problem when tomorrow rolls around.
Your hills and valleys analogy has stronger legs than my bicycle analogy. I'll go with it. Thank you.
Stop anthropomorphizing the Milky Way. She doesn't like that.
The approach being used that identifies the repulsor is a valid one. Bicycle mechanics have been using it since at least 1890 in practical work.
When truing a bicycle wheel, it makes sense to talk about the push that a spoke exerts against the ground that keeps the wheel from collapsing. While you cannot push a string, the tensile pulling forces of all the spokes toward the top of the wheel are too complex to easily analyze. But fortunately it works out that you can invert your frame of reference and then not worry about those forces since in the inverted framework those tensile pulling forces become a single push through the one spoke that opposes the sum of the vectors of all the other spokes.
A miniaturized bicycle mechanic standing on the inside surface of a wheel's rim could use this pushing vector to figure out where the hub of the wheel was. That is never done only because bicycle mechanics are big enough to eyeball the entire wheel. But scale the metaphor up....
That is what is being done here. It is an interesting study, and much more than a theoretical sleight of hand. It suggests that the Milky Way is moving away from a specific point, which they are calling the "Dipole Repulsor", but which can also be described as the Center Of The Big Empty. I did not see anything in the article that suggests that we know how far away the COTBE is, but it looks like we at least know its direction from Earth, the Solar System, and the Milky Way. That's more than we knew before.
It has long been understood that the universe is expanding like the surface of a balloon that is being inflated. This work suggests that we may now know the direction to the center of the (possibly local) universe. I'm not entirely sure of the scale of the implications... this could be on the scale of the Copernican Revolution.
No, no, no, you've got it all backwards.
With the tremendous amount of raw material on the lunar surface, intense solar power, and reactionless engines, there will not only be huge penal colonies providing cheap labor to the regolith cement factories, but habitats at the Lagrangian points and deep space probes will be built of concrete.
Do you really think all those objects in the asteroid belt are natural? Did it never occur to you that some of those near Earth orbit objects might be used by the bug eyed monsters to monitor human activities?
Someone has not been reading their Heinlein.
They probably will go after the lunar dust first. That thing is abrasive as hell, and probably useful in some industry.
True, that.
Early lunar habitats will be built of cinderbrick and mortar made from regolith. It is very likely that a strong enough construction material can be made by simply sifting the regolith for the right size particles, adding water, and pouring the slurry into forms.
It probably won't even need to be baked. If baking is necessary, then that can be easily done in solar ovens using batch processes on a two week schedule.
I don't usually respond to AC posts, but yours is kind of cute in an ugly troll doll sort of way. Go ask your Grandma what an ugly troll doll looked like.
Unless plants are doing some form of cold fusion that has yet to be discovered, they are not producing oxygen. They are simply moving existing oxygen from one molecule to another.
Please refrain from mixing up chemistry and nuclear physics. Better yet, please refrain from posting on slashdot until you know the difference between the different fields of scientific inquiry.
I thought oxygen was heavy enough that it was only formed in supernovas? That the fusion process in normal stars could not produce elements that heavy?
Or is it that oxygen formation is now considered the borderline between what a living star can produce and what requires a supernova's environment?
I'm behind in my knowledge of astrophysics. I never got beyond reading layman level material, and for several decades I've been distracted by other things. So what is the current thinking about stellar fusion products? Does this have any implications for carbon dating, etc?
What's really funny is that this could be the truth.
Some viruses are thought to be small enough to escape the Earth's atmosphere. Bacterial spores are considerably larger, but still small enough that the panspermia hypothesis --that life on Earth was originally seeded by space-borne spores-- is a viable concept (not necessarily true, but cannot be dismissed by anything within current scientific knowledge). When you consider that the upper atmosphere is under constant bombardment by meteors, there is enough outside energy being introduced at local levels to propel even large pieces of dust, pollens, spores, and virus particles into the region where magnetospheric influences become more significant than Earth gravity.
Since lunar regolith has been collecting and probably preserving stuff for at least as long as life on Earth has existed, there might be detectable levels of viruses or even spores or possibly grains of pollen in the Moon dust. I wonder if anyone has bothered to look for that yet? I am guessing not; I doubt that anyone has even done the theoretical work to estimate the amount of bioactive substances that might be present in Moon dust.
As to Monsanto's role in all this--- yes, their corporate history demonstrates a willingness to file lawsuits whenever one of their pet plants escapes the designated plots of those who buy Monsanto's devilseed. :)
Wooosh. Just that: whooooosh!
I have only a hazy memory of all this. I was 18 at the time of the disaster, and 19 or 20 when the investigation reports became public.
But what I do recall is that the weight of the nitrogen tanks and the equipment needed to monitor and maintain the nitrogen level was more than NASA was willing to do. On reflection, probably there were no off-the-shelf systems that would have met NASA's needs, and the cost and time needed to develop another custom subsystem would have been a major consideration. Cousteau had been using helium plus oxygen atmospheres in his deep sea environments and I recall that was considered, but rejected for cosmetic reasons. NASA did not want its astronauts sounding like cartoon characters in the news clips.
I had just turned 18. I was self-absorbed with all the issues of the last year of high school, I was not much for reading newspapers, and for reasons I don't now recall I had very limited access to TV news.
My initial reaction was that this had been just another worksite accident, not that much different than when a construction trench collapsed and killed three guys laying pipe. Except that this fire happened to celebrity astronauts and a high profile NASA program and a microphone recorded their final moments. It was only later, as news from the investigation became available, that I learned about the insane level of stupidity that created the fire.
I did not know, until I read this TFA, that the capsule had been mated to the rocket: early reports gave me the impression that the tragedy had occurred in a testing room. Nor did I know that the pure oxygen was at higher than atmospheric pressure. My recollection is that the reports of that time said that Apollo 1 was using pure oxygen at low PSI. It was not reported that flammables that had been declared too dangerous for the Apollo program had been reinstalled for the test. I would have remembered that. Early reports suggested that the fire had started by a static electricity spark as the astronauts moved about in the cabin.
I recall that NASA had originally rejected the N + O2 environment for some good reason (too heavy? I don't remember). And that NASA had considered using He + O2, which was being used by Cousteau in his deep sea environments, but rejected that because the astronauts would sound like the cartoon characters. So NASA went with the low pressure pure O2 because the astronauts would sound like manly men in the news reports.
The death of these astronauts was the culmination of a comedy of errors, where several different safety measures were relaxed because each group responsible for the safety of one aspect of the problem was confident that everyone else's safety protocols were sufficient.
Ouch.
Parent post is proof positive that the Black Matter Lives theme is now resident on slashdot.
Oh noes! The "Black Matter Lives" meme is now loose in Slashdot!
I think someone as adept in the spook world as Snowden is would likely have a hidden stash somewhere. But that doesn't matter wrt this argument.
What matters here is that there is a very real and significant possibility that he could do something more. As long as that possibility exists, he can not be granted a blanket pardon. He could certainly be pardoned for specific offenses for past activity, but first those need to be specified by indictment, which has yet to be done.
We could argue over whether the possibility is 10% or 1% or 0.01%, but that would be foolish. You cannot completely argue away the possibility, and there can be no blanket pardon under these conditions.
Maybe a car analogy is necessary here. Obama, and every sitting President, has the power to pardon Johnny Queue Publique at any time after JQP has been accused of stealing a car. But there is no provision that would allow JQP to be pardoned for a car theft that has not yet occurred. The President cannot give anyone a free pass to steal a car tomorrow. Not even President Trump will be allowed to do that, any tweets to the contrary not withstanding.
A serious technical detail in granting pardon to Snowden is that there is no way to determine if his "crimes" are completed.
With Manning there is no question that the acts that put him in prison are done and history. With Nixon there was a similar situation, since he could not have possibly continued his illegal/unethical acts after he was removed from office. But with Snowden ----he is still sitting on a lot of material that may have all kinds of consequences if it is released, or may even be affecting events now, without being released, if he is using some of it to blackmail someone.
I'm not saying that he is doing any of that or would do any of that. I'm merely pointing out that the kind of actions that he could be brought to trial for are not necessarily complete, so a blanket pardon should not be done as yet.
I can only see two ways Snowden could be granted a pardon. Either he is brought into the USA justice system and charged with crimes ---then he could be pardoned of just those crimes, even before the trial is done. But he needs to indicted for specific crimes. Or the other way is that he could be given a blanket pardon on his deathbed, when he clearly has no ability to do anything more.
I am glad that Snowden did what he has done and in my opinion he is a true American patriot. But the very system that he has worked to fix cannot grant him a blanket pardon at this time.
Excedrin and other APC preparations have only one benefit over plain aspirin swallowed with coffee: for some people, there is a beneficial placebo effect with certain brand names. More power to them.
However to some extent the placebo effect is dependent on ignorance that you have been given a placebo, so if you used to find that Excedrin worked better than aspirin with coffee, I may have just destroyed that benefit for you. Too bad. Find another sugar pill.
Acetaminophen (paracetamol, Tyelnol) is no more effective than aspirin (acetylsalicilic acid or ASA) in pain relief, and IIRC, does not potentiate with ASA nor are the two taken together any better than either one taken alone when taken in the usual recommended adult doses. But I'm pulling that from 30 year old memories from my days as an RN so someone could check on that.
There are downsides to both acetaminophen and aspirin.
Too much acetaminophen can irreversibly damage your liver, possibly leading to death or a liver transplant. Since the stuff is indiscriminately added to a huge number of pain relief compounds, it is possible to OD without realizing it, especially for those who think that since the Excedrin they took 15 minutes ago isn't taking care of the headache, they'll just take some Tylenol now, and maybe wash it down with Alka Seltzer Plus. Bye bye, sucker! (BTW, if you are contemplating suicide, don't do it with a couple of bottles of Tylenol. For if the paramedics get to you in time to pump your stomach and save you, you will live the rest of your short miserable life without a working liver, and that is hell on you, and everyone who has to breathe the stenches you emit.)
Too much aspirin can permanently damage your hearing, or kill you in a number of different ways, or turn you into a semi vegetable through bleeding into your brain. One thing is that an early sign of a mild OD is tinnitus, which is a high pitched whine from damage to your inner ear. It is generally reversible by abstaining from more ASA for a time. So there is that warning sign for some people (but maybe not for you and maybe not all the time so don't rely on it).
Aspirin washed down with a cup of coffee is as effective as any of the fancy brand name compounds in treating migraine and the aches and pains of daily living. Caffeine definitely potentiates the analgesic effect of aspirin, while also acting directly on the blood vessels that cause migraine pain. Plain coffee is the preferred way of delivering the caffeine, since it contains a number of other drugs that also have some benefit, and because a warm solution more quickly gets into the blood stream than a cold one laden with sugar, etc. This statement is true when the possible benefits of a placebo reaction to a given brand name drug are discounted--- but we have already destroyed that placebo effect for you with this post, eh?
Bayer aspirin is generally priced twice as much, or more, than just plain aspirin, but is no different from any of the rest once it is out of the bottle. Still if you want to enhance your pain relief with a bit of placebo effect, Bayer might well work better for you than the cheap generic stuff.
Yes, Blender. It is cross platform and on an adequate platform (multicore CPU, certain GPUs) it could possibly do what is wanted. It can also be extended using Python plug-ins, so it could be further developed if necessary. Blender can also use render farm technology so it can probably scale to meet any reasonably large job, its limitation being only the number of computers you can afford to use.
Since the person(s) inquiring about this had not mentioned Blender, I can only assume that they are either too lazy or too lacking in basic Google skills to do any work themselves. Learning to use enough of Blender's interface to manage its video editing tools is not something one can do in a weekend. Learning enough Python to create any necessary plug-ins is also non-trivial. The inquirers seem to want someone to make a one-button application to do what they want. I think they have a basic misunderstanding of what Free Open Source Software is all about.