I have often wondered what makes a particular language a "scripting" language v.s. a "real" language.
I think languages were traditionally classified as "scripting" when their primary use was to control the execution of other executables. A point made by all of the folks in the interview is that languages such as perl, python, and ruby have developed well beyond that to the point where they can compete head-to-head with C, C#, Java, etc. In other words, trying to categorize languages as either "scripting" or "real" is inappropriate with these more modern tools.
Your velocity will be proportional to the velocity of outgoing paint molecules. That's momentum conservation:v_craft*m_craft = v_paint*m_paint. To increase velocity, you just pump more energy (and maybe use paint that boils at higher temperature).
But as somebody else already pointed out, the microwaves provide the activation energy but the energy release should be proportional to the chemical bond strength. Since that's true for chemical rocket fuels as well, I still don't see how this is a big win over what you could accomplish by expelling rocket fuel mass rather than paint mass.
something called "stored energy density". For rocket fuel it's X J/kg (look up a suitable value for X, I'm lazy). For microwaves it's exactly infinity J/kg because microwaves are not stored on board. There's some difference, eh?
Thanks for the answer, but I still need convincing. The energy release is from an interaction between the microwaves and the volatile paint. The interaction can't produce an infinite stored energy density since the amount of paint isn't infinite. Once all the paint has boiled off there's no more boost.
I would agree with your answer if we were talking about supplementing sunlight on the light sail with a ground based laser, but don't see how it applies to the paint proposal.
The idea seems to be to get a boost by expelling paint mass backwards from the sail via microwave heating of that mass.
How is this particularly better than carrying the mass as fuel and oxidizer and expelling it backwards by burning it in a rocket engine? As far as I can see, the main difference is the mass of the rocket engine itself, and I suspect that even a light sail spacecraft is still going to have rockets on board for those occasional moments when you'd like more than 0.001 g's acceleration (to avoid collisions or do docking maneuvers, for example).
What constitutes human then? The sensible answer is my view (and others) is that it depends upon the thing's ability to be part of a society with other 'humans', and to have qualities such as empathy, self-consciousness and the like which are regarded as human qualities. Without those, a thing is no more human than its DNA might be.
By that view autistic kids and a majority of/. posters are non-human.
95% of users are using Windows, making it, not Mac OS X with its market share smaller than that of Linux, a high value target.
By that logic Apache should have more exploits than Microsoft's web server, since Apache has the major market share. Since that's not so, it seems that vulnerability is a bigger factor than market share when it comes to picking targets.
That's one variant of the "bring something, know something" approach. Public key based challenge/response systems where the response is generated by an independent computing token such as a Java iButton or smart card is another example.
The right to a secure, private, verifiable vote is the very foundation our country was built on. It's a shame that more people don't take it seriously.
Why would you expect anything else in a country where a majority of those eligible to vote don't even bother to do so?
And you can't really have an oponent the way you can in real sports. How is the opponent going to stop you? In football cornerbacks try and stop wide recievers. In basketball people are gaurded. In baseball the pitcher trys to make you miss the pitch. What can your opponent do do in math? Nothing.
Are you claiming that track and field events aren't sports because they don't involve blocking maneuvers? (I wouldn't want to play defense against the javelin throwers!) There are lots of sports which have nothing to do with blocking opponents. What sports seem to have in common is opportunities to outperform the opposition. Math wouldn't be eliminated by that criterion.
In the survey only 2,500 people were polled. That's an insanely small number to post concerning such a wide spread thing as computers. That is like taking a group of 100 people in New York and using that as a representitive sample. An online poll could have gathered more like 50,000 on a well traveled site.
That's not how statistics works. Online polls are not random samples, they're self-selected, so results obtained in the manner you propose would almost certainly be inaccurate. Conversely, if you have a random sample then 2500 people are more than enough. A random sample is where each member of the population has an equal likelihood of being selected, or equivalently, the likelihood of getting respondents of a certain type is equal to the proportion of that type in the population.
Contrary to popular belief, the sample sizze required for a given level of statistical precision is NOT some big percentage of the population if sampling is random. Think of having a medical test on a blood sample. Since blood is well mixed, small amounts drawn from anywhere in your body are representative of the whole amount. There's no need to take 20 or 30% of your blood, nor to spike you all over your anatomy, they just need enough to work with. Thank goodness!
While I agree that avoiding GUIs is desirable for neophytes, I strongly disagree with recommending BASIC of any sort. It's an evil language, because it teaches bad habits. When I taught intro CS courses, my worst students were invariably the ones who thought they knew it all because they'd screwed around with BASIC on their own. They started off fast, and then hit a wall where they had to unlearn a lot before they could progress.
I'd recommend Ruby. It has all the features that make BASIC appeal to people - easy to learn; interpreted (immediate feedback); can do simple things quickly - and none of the drawbacks. It offers modern flow control and data structures, and gets you into "thinking objects" very naturally and quickly. You can take it as far as you like, since it's fully capable of handling large designs, GUI's, etc. Plus, it's portable - the same Ruby scripts work on Windows, MacOS, and *nix.
You get way more mileage out of choosing an appropriate algorithm, e.g., an O(n log n) sort instead of O(n^2), than out of tweaking the code. Hmmm, kind of reminds me of the discussion about math in CS programs.
Every time I'm tempted to start micro-optimizing, I remind myself of the following three simple rules:
1) Don't.
2) If you feel tempted to violate rule 1, at least wait until you've finished writing the program.
3) Non-trivial programs are never finished.
They are giving away Internet browsers and media players, dumbass. Free downloads of Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player for Windows, Mac, and at one point UNIX, are available on their website.
Time for a new moderating category "Unintentionally Funny".
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How is this particularly better than carrying the mass as fuel and oxidizer and expelling it backwards by burning it in a rocket engine? As far as I can see, the main difference is the mass of the rocket engine itself, and I suspect that even a light sail spacecraft is still going to have rockets on board for those occasional moments when you'd like more than 0.001 g's acceleration (to avoid collisions or do docking maneuvers, for example).
It's Marvin.
That's one variant of the "bring something, know something" approach. Public key based challenge/response systems where the response is generated by an independent computing token such as a Java iButton or smart card is another example.
The problem with biometrics is that the data can't be changed or revoked, and it is recordable and replayable.
Why would you expect anything else in a country where a majority of those eligible to vote don't even bother to do so?
What's the coporate version of a red sports car and a trophy wife?
Contrary to popular belief, the sample sizze required for a given level of statistical precision is NOT some big percentage of the population if sampling is random. Think of having a medical test on a blood sample. Since blood is well mixed, small amounts drawn from anywhere in your body are representative of the whole amount. There's no need to take 20 or 30% of your blood, nor to spike you all over your anatomy, they just need enough to work with. Thank goodness!
I'd recommend Ruby. It has all the features that make BASIC appeal to people - easy to learn; interpreted (immediate feedback); can do simple things quickly - and none of the drawbacks. It offers modern flow control and data structures, and gets you into "thinking objects" very naturally and quickly. You can take it as far as you like, since it's fully capable of handling large designs, GUI's, etc. Plus, it's portable - the same Ruby scripts work on Windows, MacOS, and *nix.
How do you say "I love the ones with the crunchy outside!" in grizzly-speak?
Every time I'm tempted to start micro-optimizing, I remind myself of the following three simple rules:
2) If you feel tempted to violate rule 1, at least wait until you've finished writing the program.
3) Non-trivial programs are never finished.
"Let's do the time warp again!"
Telling that twerp Bill that he should quit school and try his hand in the computer industry.