My thought is that unmanned moon/mars missions would provide far greater benefits for science at this point in time. Humans are difficult to keep alive and there is little cargo space left for scientific endeavours.
Science however has little to do with this. The symbolism and unfication of manned missions are too great a political lure to resist.
Mind you, jettisoning the politicians sounds like a good start.:)
I mean I don't waste money on it, but I went to uni with a numerical statistician who seemed to make quite a decent income through relative number distributions, a small permutator, and about $10k of startup capital...
I can't remember (and wasn't told) all of the details, but it basically revolved around the fact that lotteries are random but statistically biased towards generation of paired numbers (ie. 10 and 11, or 23 and 24), or even a pair of paired numbers.
It wasn't a get-rich-quick scheme, required capital to start, but he seemed quite able to maintain his margin.
The real issue here was the alleged bashing and hospitalisation of an 8 year old girl - apparently the alleged perpetrator messaged the author as he was role playing a priest.
Should these companies be responsible for reporting such abuse? In this case they are the only entity with sufficient information to report the issue...
A r/l analogy could end with the entity being charged with accesory, or at least accesory after the fact.
The suspension of his account seems to me to be a attempt to remove a "squeaky wheel". Such a shame it ended up on gamespot and/. (can you spell bad publicity boys and girls?).
Q.
PS. To be honest I don't know where I stand on this issue, but I think EA has a resposibility to at least investigate such serious allegations.
64 bit still isn't cost effective in terms of bang-for-bucks unless you have access to 64 bit binaries.
Even if 64 bit binaries are available you will probably get greater performance at a lower cost by using "cheap as chips"(sic) chips in SMP configurations.
Future proofing is another issue however. Many clustering technologies rely upon a common denominator. For instance with OpenMOSIX running on varied hardware, your code must be compiled for the lowest common denominator. So if you have 20 P4's and one P2, you will only be able to run software compiled for P2 on the cluster (at least without errors).
I was referring to the vector processing units, of which there are two, and each of which "...perform multiply/accumulate operations on 4 single precision floats simultaneously with single cycle throughput."
Or if you prefer:
"You must design before coding.
Lots of people have said this about PS2 - you cannot just sit down and code away and expect high speed programs as a result. You have to plan and design your code around the hardware and that requires insight into how the machine works."
If you want a reference I quoted from here. But to be honest if you can't find a thousand pages on this topic you cant type google....
"The the dilution of historical fact is a very dangerous thing..."
I wouldn't get too worked up about "historical FACT" (my emphasis) if I was you. His-story(sic) tends to be written by the winner, the influential, etc.
This is not to denigrate the achievments of these people, but to blindly follow the textbooks that the education system of your country provided for you is a far more dangerous thing than to acknowledge that science is a collaborative endeavour. That great leaps (calculus for instance) can be made "independantly" by multiple people. Why were the discoveries simultaneous? Because it relied upon the intellectual environment to enable the discovery.
In a rarefied intellectual atmosphere, the rate of progress slows to a crawl. It is only through open and communal supposition, criticism, and debate that we can advance at our current rate.
The biological effects of pole reversal/collapse is a subject of much debate, but it seems the height of ego to say it will be pretty, slightly cancerous, and that's about it.
The following quote is from here. But there are any other good resources out there.
"There have in fact been two periods in which mass extinction of a number of species, composed of a great number of individuals, occurred. One of these, at the close of Permian period, was characterized by the disappearance of nearly half of the species of animals then in existence, ranging from protozoans to land-dwelling tetrapods. At the end of the Cretaceous period a similar event occurred, in which a great variety of species again disappeared, including the dinosaurs and the flying and marine reptiles. In both instances the events coincided with the reestablishment of frequent magnetic field reversals following a long quiescent interval. The field reversal therefore seems to represent an evolutionary selective process of great importance."
Also note that we are believed to be in a "quiescent interval" at the moment, although all indications seem to be that it is soon to end.
I feel the analogy of the blind people each holding onto their part of the elephant is appropriate at this juncture.
"There is no way the PS2 processors can handle 4 player network games with voice". Even without voice you won't be able to race more than 4 at a time.... on broadband...
%start troll%
That is because it is a crap platform. And before the fanboys start, if you haven't tried to split a simple process 8 ways to try and get it to execute in a vaguely realtime fashion on a PS2, or if you haven't gotten lovely textures and then downscaled to murky smudgy messes, then don't bother (it'll take years of your life).
%end troll%
I disagree, speed is and allways will be the biggest killer on motorbikes - not that it doesn't blend well(sic) with alchohol... The ABT has a page which includes the quote: "In multiple vehicle crashes where the motorcyclist was judged to be at fault, excess speed was a factor in nearly half of the cases. Drugs were a contributing factor in one in eight cases."
I am not sure on statistics in the rest of the world, but I know that in Australia we have a population of cyclists which is defined as males aged 18-25, on an 800cc or larger motorbike.
Of this population, annually 1/3 dies in motorbike related accidents. Can't find a ref. but I couldn't believe it when I read....
The lead from the old series (error 23: name retrieval failed) of BSG was on TV in Oz just a day or two ago.
He was far from complementary of the rewrites of the new BSG. Despite the abscence of earth and the trans-sexual character evolution he also discussed that indefinable quality that is the difference between classic/crappy - he did not sound hopefull...
Ah, Richard Hatch I think was the name. He didn't really want to denigrate the new series too much but you got the idea....
Hrmmm, I had pondered this exact issue at the point that I first saw this technology.
I think without developments in computer based image anomaly detection this will continue to be an enormous problem in terms of manpower and time; and even then there will be problems (computers suck at being intelligent).
I saw some pictures on the Australian ABC science program Quantum (from hazy memory) a few years ago - the pictures were of a quality comparable with an average endoscope (considering the age and analog nature of the "average" scope this is not too surprising).
The effect of pre-set stills vs. live adjustable video was still a problem but it was believed to be useful in augmenting and complementing the current techniques.
Q.
It's a hard one... personal taste varies a lot
on
Games For Both Of Us?
·
· Score: 1
I found that most of the FPS's are just too monotonous for my wife...
Finding mutually enjoyable multiplayer games is the hard part. Driving games (especially rally), Diablo-esque games, and a few of the sports games are about all that we can agree on. Your mileage may vary.
That is not to say that you cannot both enjoy single games together. We often play solo games in a tag team fashion (very useful when you have kids:) and it is amazing how much it can defuse the "frustration factor" that so many games engender in us.
"Popular opinion once held that the ARPANET was built in direct response to nuclear threat. This is not true. It's design was built around reliability and redundancy so as to allow communication to continue between major nodes in the case of an attack, but was not originally designed under the threat of nuclear war."
Ok first and foremost we need to define what we are actually discussing here. "Sugar" is not sufficiently specific.
From the first post, I assume we are referring to sucrose but not the more commonly occurring sugars like glucose, fructose (the major sugar in most fruits - to the troll), lactose, etc. Sucrose does not occur in large concentrations in nature except in a few specific cases - sugar beets, sugar cane, etc. From a bio-historical perspective it is quite obvious that we are not well adapted to eating large amounts of purified sucrose.
If you would like further information on some of the sugars and the differences between them you could have a look here.
What astounds me about the american diet is the amount of sugar that is in EVERYTHING! Even your bread has huge amounts of sugar in it. If I had to eat something sweet in the morning (as seems traditional in a number of countries) I would blow chunks all over the place - salty, fatty, plain, whatever just don't coat it in bloody sugar!
Avoid prepackaged foods and don't cover your food in sugar is the long and the short of it. Buy a bread maker, read labels (usually the ingredients are ordered in terms of weight - so the KFC coleslaw where the ingredients start "cabbage, sugar, carrots..." lets you know that the second largest ingredient is sugar... ack)
Btw, I would not reccomend that anyone eats refined (white) sugar. The processes used in it's manufacture are not what I would like to ingest - raw sugar is far preferable (I still like a bit in my tea:).
While I am meandering from topic to topic - I would reccomend that anyone who uses artificial sweetners tries this experiment. Find an ant's nest, place a unit of of your preferred artificial sweetner next to it, and see what the ants do. If it ain't good enough for ants, it ain't good enough for me.
Ok, one final ramble to the parents out there - be good with your kids. It seems a lot of the attitudes towards sweeteners and sugar content in food is very hard to "un-learn" once taught. I am trying my best to make sure that my son isn't imprinted with too many bad eating habits. This is not to say that they cannot enjoy sweets, but they are not and should not be part of a day-to-day diet. My little boy loves his fruit, and would take a good nectarine over a lollypop anyday.
A cacheable (please!), dynamically generatable (without histrionics) SVG implementation is a much awaited flash killer if you ask me.
Unfortunately MS seems hell bent on taking an open standard, hacking it to bits, making it a "proprietary standard"(sic) and no longer inter-operable with the original standard, then deluging the market with a glut of installations... Eerily reminiscant of the good old JVM days...
Slashdot Mirror
Science however has little to do with this. The symbolism and unfication of manned missions are too great a political lure to resist.
Mind you, jettisoning the politicians sounds like a good start. :)
I can't remember (and wasn't told) all of the details, but it basically revolved around the fact that lotteries are random but statistically biased towards generation of paired numbers (ie. 10 and 11, or 23 and 24), or even a pair of paired numbers.
It wasn't a get-rich-quick scheme, required capital to start, but he seemed quite able to maintain his margin.
Q.
Not exactly a jolly christmas, but I was happy to get a dentist appointment two days before christmas.
Q.
Q.
absolutely, that was the point I was trying to make.
Should these companies be responsible for reporting such abuse? In this case they are the only entity with sufficient information to report the issue...
A r/l analogy could end with the entity being charged with accesory, or at least accesory after the fact.
The suspension of his account seems to me to be a attempt to remove a "squeaky wheel". Such a shame it ended up on gamespot and /. (can you spell bad publicity boys and girls?).
Q.
PS. To be honest I don't know where I stand on this issue, but I think EA has a resposibility to at least investigate such serious allegations.
That said you may be right, replace with 386 if that is extreme enough for you. :)
Q.
Even if 64 bit binaries are available you will probably get greater performance at a lower cost by using "cheap as chips"(sic) chips in SMP configurations.
Future proofing is another issue however. Many clustering technologies rely upon a common denominator. For instance with OpenMOSIX running on varied hardware, your code must be compiled for the lowest common denominator. So if you have 20 P4's and one P2, you will only be able to run software compiled for P2 on the cluster (at least without errors).
YMMV - It's been a while. :P
Q.
I was referring to the vector processing units, of which there are two, and each of which "...perform multiply/accumulate operations on 4 single precision floats simultaneously with single cycle throughput."
Or if you prefer: "You must design before coding.
Lots of people have said this about PS2 - you cannot just sit down and code away and expect high speed programs as a result. You have to plan and design your code around the hardware and that requires insight into how the machine works."
If you want a reference I quoted from here. But to be honest if you can't find a thousand pages on this topic you cant type google....
Thanks for your uninformed comments.
Q.
I wouldn't get too worked up about "historical FACT" (my emphasis) if I was you. His-story(sic) tends to be written by the winner, the influential, etc.
This is not to denigrate the achievments of these people, but to blindly follow the textbooks that the education system of your country provided for you is a far more dangerous thing than to acknowledge that science is a collaborative endeavour. That great leaps (calculus for instance) can be made "independantly" by multiple people. Why were the discoveries simultaneous? Because it relied upon the intellectual environment to enable the discovery.
In a rarefied intellectual atmosphere, the rate of progress slows to a crawl. It is only through open and communal supposition, criticism, and debate that we can advance at our current rate.
Q.
I think we can all agree that other drivers are the major cause of most (fatal) motorcycle accidents.
Q.
The following quote is from here. But there are any other good resources out there.
"There have in fact been two periods in which mass extinction of a number of species, composed of a great number of individuals, occurred. One of these, at the close of Permian period, was characterized by the disappearance of nearly half of the species of animals then in existence, ranging from protozoans to land-dwelling tetrapods. At the end of the Cretaceous period a similar event occurred, in which a great variety of species again disappeared, including the dinosaurs and the flying and marine reptiles. In both instances the events coincided with the reestablishment of frequent magnetic field reversals following a long quiescent interval. The field reversal therefore seems to represent an evolutionary selective process of great importance."
Also note that we are believed to be in a "quiescent interval" at the moment, although all indications seem to be that it is soon to end.
I feel the analogy of the blind people each holding onto their part of the elephant is appropriate at this juncture.
Q.
%start troll%
That is because it is a crap platform. And before the fanboys start, if you haven't tried to split a simple process 8 ways to try and get it to execute in a vaguely realtime fashion on a PS2, or if you haven't gotten lovely textures and then downscaled to murky smudgy messes, then don't bother (it'll take years of your life).
%end troll%
Q.
I am not sure on statistics in the rest of the world, but I know that in Australia we have a population of cyclists which is defined as males aged 18-25, on an 800cc or larger motorbike.
Of this population, annually 1/3 dies in motorbike related accidents. Can't find a ref. but I couldn't believe it when I read....
Q.
I don't use it, just administrate the servers - but at least now there are some cpu cycles left over...
Q.
He was far from complementary of the rewrites of the new BSG. Despite the abscence of earth and the trans-sexual character evolution he also discussed that indefinable quality that is the difference between classic/crappy - he did not sound hopefull...
Ah, Richard Hatch I think was the name. He didn't really want to denigrate the new series too much but you got the idea....
Q.
She whips my arse so bad in double handed patience... :)
Q.
I think without developments in computer based image anomaly detection this will continue to be an enormous problem in terms of manpower and time; and even then there will be problems (computers suck at being intelligent).
Glad your gramps came though - mine didn't. :(
Q.
The effect of pre-set stills vs. live adjustable video was still a problem but it was believed to be useful in augmenting and complementing the current techniques.
Q.
Finding mutually enjoyable multiplayer games is the hard part. Driving games (especially rally), Diablo-esque games, and a few of the sports games are about all that we can agree on. Your mileage may vary.
That is not to say that you cannot both enjoy single games together. We often play solo games in a tag team fashion (very useful when you have kids:) and it is amazing how much it can defuse the "frustration factor" that so many games engender in us.
Q.
Ref: UTexas
Q.
Does that mean it's not sure if it believes in the existence of languages or GUIs??
I guess it is better than the atheist Eclipse, it tries to convince you that language and GUI's can't possibly exist...
Q. (It's a joke ffs...)
From the first post, I assume we are referring to sucrose but not the more commonly occurring sugars like glucose, fructose (the major sugar in most fruits - to the troll), lactose, etc. Sucrose does not occur in large concentrations in nature except in a few specific cases - sugar beets, sugar cane, etc. From a bio-historical perspective it is quite obvious that we are not well adapted to eating large amounts of purified sucrose.
If you would like further information on some of the sugars and the differences between them you could have a look here.
What astounds me about the american diet is the amount of sugar that is in EVERYTHING! Even your bread has huge amounts of sugar in it. If I had to eat something sweet in the morning (as seems traditional in a number of countries) I would blow chunks all over the place - salty, fatty, plain, whatever just don't coat it in bloody sugar!
Avoid prepackaged foods and don't cover your food in sugar is the long and the short of it. Buy a bread maker, read labels (usually the ingredients are ordered in terms of weight - so the KFC coleslaw where the ingredients start "cabbage, sugar, carrots..." lets you know that the second largest ingredient is sugar... ack)
Btw, I would not reccomend that anyone eats refined (white) sugar. The processes used in it's manufacture are not what I would like to ingest - raw sugar is far preferable (I still like a bit in my tea:).
While I am meandering from topic to topic - I would reccomend that anyone who uses artificial sweetners tries this experiment. Find an ant's nest, place a unit of of your preferred artificial sweetner next to it, and see what the ants do. If it ain't good enough for ants, it ain't good enough for me.
Ok, one final ramble to the parents out there - be good with your kids. It seems a lot of the attitudes towards sweeteners and sugar content in food is very hard to "un-learn" once taught. I am trying my best to make sure that my son isn't imprinted with too many bad eating habits. This is not to say that they cannot enjoy sweets, but they are not and should not be part of a day-to-day diet. My little boy loves his fruit, and would take a good nectarine over a lollypop anyday.
Q. (Waxing Lyrical)
A cacheable (please!), dynamically generatable (without histrionics) SVG implementation is a much awaited flash killer if you ask me.
Unfortunately MS seems hell bent on taking an open standard, hacking it to bits, making it a "proprietary standard"(sic) and no longer inter-operable with the original standard, then deluging the market with a glut of installations... Eerily reminiscant of the good old JVM days...
Q.
So you don't mind paying for unwanted functionality that will be used by 5% of purchasers?
What would be nice would be a set of bluetooth idiot detectors so that a wire from the car battery to your testicles wasn't necessary.
Q.