...you mean a baby goat, right? I mean, you can't just walk into a store and buy a child. I suppose you could kidnap one or buy one off the black market, but that's quite illegal!
Two flaws I see in your comment right away... sentience does not automatically imply that is it capable of viewing any task as boring or tedious. many humans do what you probably consider boring and tedious for a living (like assembly line workers, digging ditches, etc) and sometimes actually enjoy it. All you need is a good attention span and the ability to focus on a task, and it is no longer boring or tedious.
Second problem is safety. A machine, assuming it has been properly designed for it, is at a MUCH lower risk of damage for a given task than a human. Cleaning out an oil tanker hold is a perfect example, and so is changing out nuclear reactor cores or repairing vehicles is space.
The added advantage of a sentient machine is that the "mind" can be seperated from the "body" if you are really that concerned about it "dying" during a dangerous task, combined with the advantages of being a machine in the first place as given in the above examples. You can always build it a new body, which is a bit dfficult to do for meat and bones.
Does this mean I'd want to discuss the morning headlines with my toaster? No, not really, but poo-pooing the development of sentient machines as a whole is a big overboard.
(And on a personal note, yes we have plenty of sentient, STUPID beings on this planet who essentially do nothing BUT reproduce efficiently. So those qualities are not always a good thing IMHO) =Smidge=
99.5% is damn pure... that thing either doesn't hold more than a few ml or will have every milspec certification under the sun if it ever becomes a commercial product without requiring a license to buy! =Smidge=
Health Rating: 3 - Severe (Poison) Flammability Rating: 3 - Severe (Flammable) Reactivity Rating: 1 - Slight Contact Rating: 3 - Severe (Life) Lab Protective Equip: GOGGLES & SHIELD; LAB COAT & APRON; VENT HOOD; PROPER GLOVES; CLASS B EXTINGUISHER Storage Color Code: Red (Flammable)
Scale is 0="It's practically water" to 4="It'll kill you if you look at it". Granted the stuff probably won't be pure, but how diluted can you make it before it's no longer a usable fuel? =Smidge=
Laughing Man Fansubs is dedicated to GitS translations. They do a pretty good job, tohugh they average about a month between releases (as torrent files). They used to have the entire first season available, but now they're just hosting the first 9 episodes of season 2.
You can try suprnova for the first season, or anything else really... =Smidge=
I was always taught G as the gravitational constant, and F was force, as in F = ma... or, for gravity near the surface of a planet, F = mg, where g is the gravitational acceleration (Earth being 9.82)
In other words, exactly the opposite of what you apparently learned! (Gotta love standards in convention) =Smidge=
That is correct, however compensating for air drag is a matter of energy and not speed. My reply was refuting the OP's comment that height was irrelevant, which of corse it's not. =Smidge=
I'm not quite sure where all this "falling into orbit" talk came from. It makes no sense whatsoever to go out past your orbit altitude just to "fall" back down into the desired orbit.
You are right that energy is what it's all about... but not speed as the OP suggested. For spaceships, available energy is a matter of fuel capacity. First, you would need energy to move against the gravitational field (and air resistance/other losses), then you would need energy to get my craft moving fast enough to maintain orbit.
That still has nothing to do with "speed" to maintain orbit. Fact is speed is still a function of altitude. =Smidge=
It's about both height and speed. Speed required for a stable orbit is inversely proportional to altitude. All you have to do is balance the centripetal (F = (m*v^2)/r) with the gravitational force (F = G*m1*m2/(r^2)). The only special case is geo-synchronous orbit, in which case you must be at a specific altitude in order for the period of your orbit to match that of the earth's rotation. Other than that you can "orbit" at any speed (v) you want as long as your altitude (r) makes the above equations balance.
So as long as the ship has the guts to get far enough from the earth, it can certainly go fast enough to be in orbit. =Smidge=
First impression is that this could be a good application of the "open" community / wiki style of document management and review. The problem being that you would have to prevent the good informaton from being "polluted" by bias sources while still being able to filter out the bunk science.
Second, as someone mentioned in the previous story, maybe it would be a good idea to cast off the anonymous review anyway!
what kinds of advantages do children actually get out of having computers in schools?
Now they can keep themselves occupied while bored without disturbing the rest of the class!
Seriously, though: The idea was that the computers would become a tool to enable more effective teaching for all subjects.
<dream>
Math classes get visual and real-time interactivity with the course material, including simple games for the younger students to graphing and number-crunching applications for the more advanced courses.
English/Music (reading, writing and possibly speaking skills. I'm including music here since it's very similar in concept to speech) get word processing, desktop publishing, online literature, electronic music composition and so forth. Historical backgrounds about relevant authors/playwrights/composers and the cultures they lived in and influenced.
"Social studies" (A conglomerate of history, anthropology, government and politics, economics, etc) gets a great source of accessible information: Online texts, electronic encyclopedias with rich multimedia content, easily browsable news archives and research papers.
Sciences (physics, biology, chemistry, etc) get interactive simulation models to help teach the more abstract principles, along with a vast resources of diagrams, notes and research papers to add substance to the topics.
</dream>
Okay, so in reality it's made students overly dependent on computers to make up for their own lack of skill, and worse they are actually complacent about it! "Why should I have to learn how to do this? The computer does it for me!" But IMHO this is because everyone was (and still is) so gung-ho about putting computers in every classroom that nobody has actually taken time to build a proper curriculum around their use. And because of that, none of the teachers know how to use them as teaching tools (or at all, in most cases!) =Smidge=
Well obviously everyone has a difference experience. For example, trying to use XP is a constant aggrivation for me, but some people swear up and down that it's the best version they've ever used.
Maybe it comes down to luck? Maybe I just never did that one incredibly stupid thing that is so slight that nobody even realises they do it, but it forever ruins their system. This is why I'm curious about the stories behind the complaints. =Smidge=
Care to elaborate on your Win2K experience? I always wonder what the source of people's complaints are regarding these things.
Personally, I use it exclusively and I've never had it crash, catch a virus, get any kind of spyware/malware (other than tracker cookies). It runs quite fast unless I'm doing a whole bunch of CPU and memory intensive stuff simultaneously: Running AutoCAD, running MD5CRK in the background, burning a CD, playing music, and having 6 or 7 pages open/loading in FireFox - all at the same time (Plus other typical services like antivirus and such). Usually at that point AutoCAD's regen starts to take a little time and Firefox gets a little jittery on the scrolling but that's about it. Specs: 1.5GHz P4 with 128MB RAM. Performance wise I'm quite satisfied.
The machine I'm on now has also been running for about four months. I just 'lock' it at night to keep people from screwing with it. When I get in the next day I just turn on my monitor, type in my password and it's like I never left. =Smidge=
Re:What happens when I click on an earthquake?
on
Is This The Big One?
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Unless, of course, all this shakin' is weakening the underlying structure gradually. (Small shifts, crack propagation, etc). If that's the case then your "it hasn't broken under worse conditions before, therefore it won't fail now" conclusion is, if you'll excuse the pun, a bit shaky.
Of course, this only matters if you actually consider west California "civilization". For me this is all strictly academic.:) =Smidge=
My mouse has a thumb button on the side that makes Firefox (And Netscape 7) open the link in a new tab... so I'm guessing that it may be something with the mouse setup on the system instead of a fault in Firefox.
Currently staying with Netscape 7 (minus the editor and mail client) until Firefox reaches 1.0 at least... one thing I find rather annoying is the lack of a "new tab" button like NS7 has, on the left of the tabstrip. I use that a lot! In Firefox I have to right click on the tabstrip and select the menu item. Bah! Other than that and a slight differnece in initial loading times, NS7 seems to be just as good in every other aspect... at least for now. =Smidge=
'round here, age of consent is 18, but you have to be 21 to legally obtain pronography. I guess you just have to wear a blindfold for the first three years...
So basically you don't have time to do it right, but you might have time to do it twice?
Learning assembly isn't all about optimization, either. Being familiar with how the machine works right down to the core will make you a better programmer, peroid. Personally speaking, it also helps develop that zen like ability to "think like the computer", and that helps you program not just more efficiently but more effectively since you can think things out better. You can't tell me you're not a better programmer for having been exposed to it... it simply changes the way you think about the machine.
It can also be argued that "beautiful" code has no bearing on performance. It's also the kind of "Oh performance isn't an issue anymore" and "make te source code pretty" thinking that we now need gigahert+ machines with 128MB RAM just to write a goddamn letter... it's really quite sad that so many programmers just let their applications fill the hardware vacuum they think their users will have, or should have, just because they didn't take an extra day to think about what they're doing and write their code a little more efficiently. =Smidge=
Okay, so you get the payoff of information. I agree that really is very significant and totally worth the effort in almost all cases.
But now what? You're many billions of dollars in debt, and the thousands of people you hired (directly or indirectly) can't buy food or make mortgage payments with "information"... that's a big part of the equation you seem to be missing.
Unless of course you're still federally funded, in which case I can't see how running NASA like a "venture capitalist" will increase effort. Something tells me the people at NASA are already as gung-ho as can be about exploring the universe, and the only things holding them back are money and poltics (bad politics = public thinks "money is being wasted on space exploration" = decreased funding). =Smidge=
I am not a scientist, but I can imagine that one reason they may want to publish in a known journal is reputation and audience.
For example, Nature has a reputation for being a respectable scientific journal. You pretty much know that the people reading and reviewing your work published there will be other scientists and academics. So what other avenues does a scientist have to publish his work?
Website? Book? If so, who is your audience (as in, who is actually reading it and not who you wrote it for) and how can they generate feedback for the peer review process to work? Also, what does that say about your credibility? Lots of kooks have websites and books about all sorts of bunk science. How is someone going to tell yours apart?
Unless you already have a reputation, how do you publish something by yourself and still have people take you seriously? I think it's a fair question... =Smidge=
Slashdot Mirror
...you mean a baby goat, right? I mean, you can't just walk into a store and buy a child. I suppose you could kidnap one or buy one off the black market, but that's quite illegal!
=Smidge=
The boat would probably break a driveshaft if the ribbon didn't break first.
But then again, what would an oil supertanker be doing anywhere within a thousand miles of the anchor site?
=Smidge=
Two flaws I see in your comment right away... sentience does not automatically imply that is it capable of viewing any task as boring or tedious. many humans do what you probably consider boring and tedious for a living (like assembly line workers, digging ditches, etc) and sometimes actually enjoy it. All you need is a good attention span and the ability to focus on a task, and it is no longer boring or tedious.
Second problem is safety. A machine, assuming it has been properly designed for it, is at a MUCH lower risk of damage for a given task than a human. Cleaning out an oil tanker hold is a perfect example, and so is changing out nuclear reactor cores or repairing vehicles is space.
The added advantage of a sentient machine is that the "mind" can be seperated from the "body" if you are really that concerned about it "dying" during a dangerous task, combined with the advantages of being a machine in the first place as given in the above examples. You can always build it a new body, which is a bit dfficult to do for meat and bones.
Does this mean I'd want to discuss the morning headlines with my toaster? No, not really, but poo-pooing the development of sentient machines as a whole is a big overboard.
(And on a personal note, yes we have plenty of sentient, STUPID beings on this planet who essentially do nothing BUT reproduce efficiently. So those qualities are not always a good thing IMHO)
=Smidge=
99.5% is damn pure... that thing either doesn't hold more than a few ml or will have every milspec certification under the sun if it ever becomes a commercial product without requiring a license to buy!
=Smidge=
I've never heard of methanol used as rubbing alcohol.
Ethanol and Isopropynol yeah, but not methanol. Is there a particular product that uses it?
=Smidge=
MSDS for Methyl Alcohol
Scale is 0="It's practically water" to 4="It'll kill you if you look at it". Granted the stuff probably won't be pure, but how diluted can you make it before it's no longer a usable fuel?
=Smidge=
Don't worry, we'll put the plans on display at the local planning office!
=Smidge=
Laughing Man Fansubs is dedicated to GitS translations. They do a pretty good job, tohugh they average about a month between releases (as torrent files). They used to have the entire first season available, but now they're just hosting the first 9 episodes of season 2.
You can try suprnova for the first season, or anything else really...
=Smidge=
Apparently they have!
... or, for gravity near the surface of a planet, F = mg, where g is the gravitational acceleration (Earth being 9.82)
I was always taught G as the gravitational constant, and F was force, as in F = ma
In other words, exactly the opposite of what you apparently learned! (Gotta love standards in convention)
=Smidge=
G is the gravitational constant. 6.673e-11 m^3/kg-sec^2. Small g is generally used for near-earth gravity acceleration 9.82 m/s^2
=Smidge=
That is correct, however compensating for air drag is a matter of energy and not speed. My reply was refuting the OP's comment that height was irrelevant, which of corse it's not.
=Smidge=
I'm not quite sure where all this "falling into orbit" talk came from. It makes no sense whatsoever to go out past your orbit altitude just to "fall" back down into the desired orbit.
You are right that energy is what it's all about... but not speed as the OP suggested. For spaceships, available energy is a matter of fuel capacity. First, you would need energy to move against the gravitational field (and air resistance/other losses), then you would need energy to get my craft moving fast enough to maintain orbit.
That still has nothing to do with "speed" to maintain orbit. Fact is speed is still a function of altitude.
=Smidge=
It's about both height and speed. Speed required for a stable orbit is inversely proportional to altitude. All you have to do is balance the centripetal (F = (m*v^2)/r) with the gravitational force (F = G*m1*m2/(r^2)). The only special case is geo-synchronous orbit, in which case you must be at a specific altitude in order for the period of your orbit to match that of the earth's rotation. Other than that you can "orbit" at any speed (v) you want as long as your altitude (r) makes the above equations balance.
So as long as the ship has the guts to get far enough from the earth, it can certainly go fast enough to be in orbit.
=Smidge=
Two thoughts come to mind:
First impression is that this could be a good application of the "open" community / wiki style of document management and review. The problem being that you would have to prevent the good informaton from being "polluted" by bias sources while still being able to filter out the bunk science.
Second, as someone mentioned in the previous story, maybe it would be a good idea to cast off the anonymous review anyway!
=Smidge=
what kinds of advantages do children actually get out of having computers in schools?
Now they can keep themselves occupied while bored without disturbing the rest of the class!
Seriously, though: The idea was that the computers would become a tool to enable more effective teaching for all subjects.
<dream>
Math classes get visual and real-time interactivity with the course material, including simple games for the younger students to graphing and number-crunching applications for the more advanced courses.
English/Music (reading, writing and possibly speaking skills. I'm including music here since it's very similar in concept to speech) get word processing, desktop publishing, online literature, electronic music composition and so forth. Historical backgrounds about relevant authors/playwrights/composers and the cultures they lived in and influenced.
"Social studies" (A conglomerate of history, anthropology, government and politics, economics, etc) gets a great source of accessible information: Online texts, electronic encyclopedias with rich multimedia content, easily browsable news archives and research papers.
Sciences (physics, biology, chemistry, etc) get interactive simulation models to help teach the more abstract principles, along with a vast resources of diagrams, notes and research papers to add substance to the topics.
</dream>
Okay, so in reality it's made students overly dependent on computers to make up for their own lack of skill, and worse they are actually complacent about it! "Why should I have to learn how to do this? The computer does it for me!" But IMHO this is because everyone was (and still is) so gung-ho about putting computers in every classroom that nobody has actually taken time to build a proper curriculum around their use. And because of that, none of the teachers know how to use them as teaching tools (or at all, in most cases!)
=Smidge=
Well obviously everyone has a difference experience. For example, trying to use XP is a constant aggrivation for me, but some people swear up and down that it's the best version they've ever used.
Maybe it comes down to luck? Maybe I just never did that one incredibly stupid thing that is so slight that nobody even realises they do it, but it forever ruins their system. This is why I'm curious about the stories behind the complaints.
=Smidge=
Care to elaborate on your Win2K experience? I always wonder what the source of people's complaints are regarding these things.
Personally, I use it exclusively and I've never had it crash, catch a virus, get any kind of spyware/malware (other than tracker cookies). It runs quite fast unless I'm doing a whole bunch of CPU and memory intensive stuff simultaneously: Running AutoCAD, running MD5CRK in the background, burning a CD, playing music, and having 6 or 7 pages open/loading in FireFox - all at the same time (Plus other typical services like antivirus and such). Usually at that point AutoCAD's regen starts to take a little time and Firefox gets a little jittery on the scrolling but that's about it. Specs: 1.5GHz P4 with 128MB RAM. Performance wise I'm quite satisfied.
The machine I'm on now has also been running for about four months. I just 'lock' it at night to keep people from screwing with it. When I get in the next day I just turn on my monitor, type in my password and it's like I never left.
=Smidge=
Unless, of course, all this shakin' is weakening the underlying structure gradually. (Small shifts, crack propagation, etc). If that's the case then your "it hasn't broken under worse conditions before, therefore it won't fail now" conclusion is, if you'll excuse the pun, a bit shaky.
:)
Of course, this only matters if you actually consider west California "civilization". For me this is all strictly academic.
=Smidge=
It comes from England, eh? I wonder if it's patented... Monty Python would have prior art!
(If you have to think about that, you're not a real geek!)
=Smidge=
My mouse has a thumb button on the side that makes Firefox (And Netscape 7) open the link in a new tab... so I'm guessing that it may be something with the mouse setup on the system instead of a fault in Firefox.
Currently staying with Netscape 7 (minus the editor and mail client) until Firefox reaches 1.0 at least... one thing I find rather annoying is the lack of a "new tab" button like NS7 has, on the left of the tabstrip. I use that a lot! In Firefox I have to right click on the tabstrip and select the menu item. Bah! Other than that and a slight differnece in initial loading times, NS7 seems to be just as good in every other aspect... at least for now.
=Smidge=
=Smidge=
So basically you don't have time to do it right, but you might have time to do it twice?
Learning assembly isn't all about optimization, either. Being familiar with how the machine works right down to the core will make you a better programmer, peroid. Personally speaking, it also helps develop that zen like ability to "think like the computer", and that helps you program not just more efficiently but more effectively since you can think things out better. You can't tell me you're not a better programmer for having been exposed to it... it simply changes the way you think about the machine.
It can also be argued that "beautiful" code has no bearing on performance. It's also the kind of "Oh performance isn't an issue anymore" and "make te source code pretty" thinking that we now need gigahert+ machines with 128MB RAM just to write a goddamn letter... it's really quite sad that so many programmers just let their applications fill the hardware vacuum they think their users will have, or should have, just because they didn't take an extra day to think about what they're doing and write their code a little more efficiently.
=Smidge=
Okay, so you get the payoff of information. I agree that really is very significant and totally worth the effort in almost all cases.
But now what? You're many billions of dollars in debt, and the thousands of people you hired (directly or indirectly) can't buy food or make mortgage payments with "information"... that's a big part of the equation you seem to be missing.
Unless of course you're still federally funded, in which case I can't see how running NASA like a "venture capitalist" will increase effort. Something tells me the people at NASA are already as gung-ho as can be about exploring the universe, and the only things holding them back are money and poltics (bad politics = public thinks "money is being wasted on space exploration" = decreased funding).
=Smidge=
I am not a scientist, but I can imagine that one reason they may want to publish in a known journal is reputation and audience.
For example, Nature has a reputation for being a respectable scientific journal. You pretty much know that the people reading and reviewing your work published there will be other scientists and academics. So what other avenues does a scientist have to publish his work?
Website? Book? If so, who is your audience (as in, who is actually reading it and not who you wrote it for) and how can they generate feedback for the peer review process to work? Also, what does that say about your credibility? Lots of kooks have websites and books about all sorts of bunk science. How is someone going to tell yours apart?
Unless you already have a reputation, how do you publish something by yourself and still have people take you seriously? I think it's a fair question...
=Smidge=
"Sir! We have lost contact with the probes!"
"Oh no! The mission is in jeopardy! Hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars wasted!"
"But there is some good news, sir."
"Really? What?"
"We saved a bunch of money on the insurance by switching to Geico!"
=Smidge=