Er...except its not. As you leave the atmosphere the gravitational force decreases, air resistance decreases. Additionally since the center of mass of the cable is in geosynchronous orbit or higher, the most strain on the cable will be at the point where the earth is "tied down" to the cable. Temperature and radiation extremes are problematic, but solutions for these problems already exist in current space technology. The only unsolved problem that requires the full length is power for the lifter, and that can be added to the design later.
Shouldn't your webserver provide this information? I mean I haven't set up Apache in a while, but it has all that information, and it seems like something someone could easily write a module to do, or at least a script to parse the logs..
Because it requires the new SOI process which is more expensive than the standard CMOS processes. Currently DRAM probably doesn't use these more expensive processes (because they don't need to be as fast) so changing to ZRAM would be more expensive.
The truth about multidimensional arrays
on
What is Perl 6?
·
· Score: 1
In most languages multidimensional arrays are actually made with arrays of arrays (of arrays of arrays...) with one set of arrays for each dimension.
This works out to use arrays of pointers to arrays for all but the last dimension.
So the code
@A = ( ["Hello", "Good Evening", "I can't let you do that"], ["Dave", "HAL", "Bob", "shadow_slicer"]);
actually creates @A as an array of pointers to the other arrays (which perl calls references) The [ tell perl to return a reference. The ( tells perl to return a list.
For a 3 dimensional array
prints "Help"
The first index tells it to select the array containing references to the arrays containing "Help" and "I'm". The second index selects the array containing "Help". The final dimension selects the string "Help" from the array. For me at least it helps to visualize it as a tree:
^^^^^ _B__ ^^^^ ^^ __/ ^^ \_ ^^B[] ^ / ^\ ^^ / \ ^B[][] ^/\ ^/\ ^/\/\ B[][][] H M I T I 3 D !
With the first letter of each entry showing where it is on the tree.
(^ added to preserve formatting through slashdot lameness filter...)
So in summary you have the list @D = ("Help", "Me");. you grab a pointer to it and put it in another array as the first entry $C[0] = \@D;. Then you take a pointer to that and put it in the main array as the first entry $B[0] = \@C;.
Then you repeat this for each element you want to add, putting them in the appropriate entry in each array. Voila you have a multidimensional array.
(Note that I have not tested any of this with perl5 since I don't have it on my work PC, so I may have some small typos, but the theory is correct)
Of course statically dimensioned arrays (in C anyway) are usually optimized by the compiler into a single array that use an index calculated by multiplying one of the dimensions size by the other dimensions index and then adding this result to the other index. This is actually faster in some cases (especially on x86 machines which support this via a single instruction) and avoids keeping the extra arrays of pointers.
IMHO OoO execution is not at all important for an embedded processor such as that found in a game system. Since the physical processor and system is known, instructions can be reordered by the compiler. Additionally the Cell is not a traditional vector processor. Each of the 8 nodes can be made completely independent, and can function in a sort of SMP mode. I took a class in Parallel Computer Architecture last semester and we covered the Cell processor in detail. While coding for the cell is very different from coding for other cpus I don't think it will require massive amounts of programmer work -- just careful research and design.
why bother transmitting position speed or direction of travel? Just transmit a pulse. The reciever can then calculate speed and position and direction of travel very easily. This way the minimum requirements of all cars is very very low -- just a transmitter on a timer. Just add a simple government requirement of it on all cars produced from today on, and in 20 years we could have a working system based on this principle.
"P.S. It is an intriguing fact that the first 6 base pairs of DNA before the first start codon in chromosome 1 (GATCAA) can be mapped directly on to the digits of pi in base 4. This suggests the code A=0, C=1, T=2, G=3."
I found this terribly funny... 6 digits of base 4 has less accuracy than 4 digits of base 10. So the value of "pi" parent was talking about was 3.140625
It means that your explanation doesn't really explain anything.
If it goes:
A occurred because of B
B occurred because of C
C occurred because of C
C occurred because of C ....
Does it really matter how many C's preceded the first C? Furthermore if you cut it anywhere after the second statement you're left with the same question, "Why did C occur?". So this provides no extra value to the argument. Why are the C's in an infinite sequence? Why did it suddenly (and apparently randomly) break away from repeating C's to cause B? Could it be that all those C's aren't really C's, but actually differ? If so what was the first instance that started it?
So in short infinite tail recursion is fine. Infinite head recursion can't exist without some terminating condition (implying a hidden state, which brings the question of what was the initial state (at time "negative infinity" or 0).
If there were 6 million English speakers with 330 million Spanish, I would learn Spanish (incidentally that's why I'm learning Chinese).
"Cultural heritage" is a sort of reactionary bullshit that people like to pull out so they can talk about how bad things are now. Culture constantly changes, merging or reacting with other cultures it meets. While you might say that some pieces of culture are "lost" in this process, they are usually just replaced by new pieces of culture that better fit the needs of the current society. Of course these laws aren't about protecting culture anymore than they are about protecting freedom of speech. As you said, it requires you to speak both French and English equally. If you want to speak Spanish or Japanese, that's just too bad -- only French is sacred. And that's only on commercial signs and products. If you decide to have a conversation in your own home you can speak whatever language you want (preserve your cultural heritage at home if you choose).
In short these laws are the cry of the buggy whip makers, the Intelligent Designers and many other groups finding that upon finding their power is fading they try to inact a law which inconveniences a lot of people, just to make them feel important again.
When you click something, it is activated NOW. When you move your mouse over something there is a delay before it is activated. When I want to get something done, I want to get it done NOW. I can't stand the delay. Furthermore making actions time-based means that it is impossible for you to stop in the middle of something, since the mouse would continue to select various things if it gets bumped around while you are doing something else.
There are really two types of standards: Implementation Standards (which say that everyone should do things the exact same way) Interoperability Standards (which say that everyone should do things such that others can understand them)
Most of the slashdot crowd are probably against the former (which creates a monoculture) and in favor of the latter.
At some point in an earlier discussion (a few weeks ago) someone brought up the effects of Methane as a greenhouse gas. I haven't heard much about this (as CO2 gets most of the bad press), but a few articles I googled suggested that a given amount of methane has a vastly greater effect on the environment than the same amount of CO2. I realize there is probably a lot more C02 out there, but if methane is such a big problem, why aren't we focusing more on capturing it (and maybe even using it for energy)? Human activity produces a lot of methane (Wikipedia says 60% of global production.. -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane). Why are we only focusing on CO2?
They would cost about the same. Modern cell phones do most of their signal processing in software, so they have to have fairly beefy processors to begin with. So they basically already have the hardware to handle everything you mentioned. They're just trying to get the most use out of the hardware.
I don't know about GSM but with CDMA the clock needs to be accurately sync-ed to the network for communication to occur. So they just wrote a small program to display the time. 3D graphics could be easily implemented with the DSP chip the phones already use for communication (this chip isn't that busy when you're not talking on the phone..)...
Address books, and calendars are extra, but not hard to implement. The biggest fluff on modern cell-phones are cameras, but those only add a ~$5 part.
What makes you think we're "glorifying these acts"? Video games don't say these acts are wonderful, great, christ-like or anything like that. The characters in the games ARE NOT role-models. How many children grow thinking they want to become a drug-dealer for a living (except of course for children who meet drug-dealers in real life). These characters get shot at. They die. I'm not sure how you can build a case for "glorifying" (if you can, I'd love to see it).
And what makes you think that restricting access to violent video games will reduce the amount of violent crime? The most recent statistics I could find (from the US Department of Justice) showed that as of 2002 juvenile crime was at a 15 year low (http://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/ojjdp/204608.pdf). During this same period video games became more and more violent and more and more available. Additionally crime had been decreasing since 1997 (The year GoldenEye came out for the N64 and Carmageddon appeared on the PC). If anything these statistics would show a negative coorelation between violent video games and teen violence..
I don't know. I think that everyone could probably be a good programmer if they practiced enough. You say you've been programming since you were 9. I've been programming since I was about that old as well. But a lot of the CS and SE major's first programming experience is freshman year in college. This puts them 10 years behind. There's no way they can gain the amount of experience they need to be a good programmer over the course of 4 years (Especially since they probably don't program outside of classes).
How long after you started programming did you become what you would call a "good" programmer? (I know it took me at least 7 years...)
Though reversing a string seems like an interesting problem...
void reversestring(char *str, int len) { int i; for (i = 0; i < len/2; i++) { str[i] ^= str[len-i-1]; str[len-i-l] ^= str[i]; str[i] ^= str[len-i-1]; } }
Though this solution doesn't work with multibyte character sets....
You had to have seen it. It wasn't violent or emotional or anything like that. Mal calmly lays out this is what we're going to do and this how things will work, and then the bad guy is like I'm going to track you down and what not. Then Mal nonchalantly kicks the guy into the path of the engine intake and then picks up the next baddy in line and starts his speech over.
This sort of thing has been done before (but not to death), but the acting and scripting in this particular part was flawless IMHO...
It's even worse when the password systems aren't self-consistent. At a company I used to work for I had a certain password: "!sw33th0m3Alabama~". Since I was a low-ranked engineer at the time, My office was provided an old Windows 98 system. My login and password worked perfectly that. Then one day I needed to login to one of the NT 4.0 machines in the lab. The NT machine wouldn't let me log on...After dealing with IT for an hour I told them to just to reset my password. I ended up changing it to "Pa55word". After that it worked....
I don't know what universe you crawled out of, but it bears no resemblence to mine....
1 - The principals are usually either lowly teachers (at most Masters-level graduates) or other random people that the school board happens to like. These people generally have no management skills or experience. Some of them don't know how to deal with the politics that can be avoided by lowly teachers. Some of them let the promotion go to their head and micromanage everything (after all they are the principal so they must know how things work better than those that didn't). For the type of job principals do, MBA's would probably be better able to deal with the administrative and political aspects and would be less likely to micromanage.
2 - The mandatory meetings (around here) are usually weekly to biweekly affairs that can last 3 or 4 hours. The non-hierarchal structure of school organization means that everything that needs to be discussed will be discussed during these meetings, whether its relevant to all members or not. This means that most of this meeting is completely irrelevant to the individuals present.
3 - The principal as more experience at what? Teaching 3rd graders math? 7th Grader's Spanish? Blind children colors? The fact is the principal is not all-knowing and probably only knows a bit about the specific subjects and grades that they taught. That they generally wave this around as generic years that are applicable from Algebra to Special Education only makes it worse.
4 - Tenure is meant to save good teachers from the whims of the current principal and school board. It accomplishes this job pretty well, but those untenured few who happen to come up for tenure at the wrong time are more likely to get fired than tenured (more likely than not for political reasons). And of course it also may keep bad teachers around too, but that was just a side effect...
5 - Sometimes there are team leaders. In primary schools, where every subject is generally taught by a single teacher, teachers are divided into grades and a leader is chosen. In schools where teachers only teach one subject, they are divided into departments and a leader is chosen. Of course being a team leader doesn't mean you get paid more, it only means you carry more responsibilities. Of course even though they're divided into teams, they all have to go to mandatory meetings to discuss everything...
Bad analogy. A better analogy would be that car manufacturers should make light, efficient cars that can go hundreds of thousands of miles without any maintenance at all, and if they break down can be easily fixed using well documented interfaces.
If the car industry was run the same way Microsoft was run you'd see huge hulking cars that eat gas for breakfast and break down or are recalled often. When they break they require special proprietary equipment to be fixed. Oh wait....
If you watch the video, it only tracks the white of the t-shirt. You can see this in the second part of the video where it shows the tracking area (which mostly consists of a rectangle around the shirt). So it can only attack people wearing bright white clothing.
While this is neat, it's not quite "The Quintessential Sentry Gun". Call me when you get better human-shape recognition....
...
So remember kids, when you go out burgularizing, Don't Wear White.
It's a long electromagnetic track that accelerates an object to escape velocity. If it works it would be really fast and cheap (the pdf says $1 per pound....). It also should be less fragile than the space elevator (and easier to repair).
This sort of idea has been around for years. If you've read Heinlein's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress", this technology was used to launch stuff from the moon. Odd that nothing has come of it...
The OS has 100% control. No application can overwrite another application without the OS's prior approval. Norton Antivirus asks for the OS's approval before scanning applications. It can also ask the OS to stop running tasks (this has nothing to do with protecting memory spaces though...). Debuggers and cheat programs ask the OS to let them modify running applications (debuggers do this to set breakpoints).
In this way the MMU will prevent accidental overwrites of other program's memory spaces. Of course if the application has already requested access to another application's address space and not yet told the OS that it is done, it could easily take that application down with it. And it doesn't work so well against intentional attacks. But if you run something in a sandbox, it means the OS refuses any requests to access the memory of other processes or tell processes to do anything.
Also programming language has nothing to do with these permissions. The operating system cannot tell a C program from a C++ program from an assembly program, since after compilation/assembly they're all machine code (which is all the OS sees). Even programs written in interpreted languages have to follow these rules (and maybe a few more).
That's not necessarily true. You see, ever since the '286 (or was it the '386) came out systems have had "Memory Management Units". Now DOS didn't really use the MMU so anything could write whereever it felt like.
Modern operating systems make good use of the MMU. They use it mostly for virtual memory and paging, but also set permissions on segments of memory on a per application basis. This means that application A can't overwrite application B unless the operating system says it's ok... If you ever had a program crash because of a "NULL pointer exception" or "Segfault" or "page fault exception" or "invalid page fault" then you've seen the results of this protection.
Nice post, except for one thing: Capacitance is not a limit on the voltage in a capacitor. Capacitance is just the ratio of stored charge to voltage. A higher capacitance means that it stores more charge at a given voltage. What limits the voltage in a capacitor is the dielectric breakdown voltage. This is the voltage where the insulator between the two plates becomes conductive and arcing occurs.
But of course, even if the person involved did have a field that big, with a capacitance of 204pF they would only be storing 0.3264 Joules of energy (which couldn't increase the temperature of a gram of water by half a degree)...
Sorry to be a pedant, but the quote said "voltage" and you went off on "power". The two are not analogous. Running with a lower voltage (at the same frequency) is based on the properties of the transistors and reflects a more advanced fabrication technique. I don't know (and am too lazy to check) if the claims in that quote about voltage are true, but if they are then that means Intel has more room for growth in the future (which is probably more important to Apple than what is going on right now).
Slashdot Mirror
Er...except its not. As you leave the atmosphere the gravitational force decreases, air resistance decreases. Additionally since the center of mass of the cable is in geosynchronous orbit or higher, the most strain on the cable will be at the point where the earth is "tied down" to the cable.
Temperature and radiation extremes are problematic, but solutions for these problems already exist in current space technology. The only unsolved problem that requires the full length is power for the lifter, and that can be added to the design later.
Shouldn't your webserver provide this information?
I mean I haven't set up Apache in a while, but it has all that information, and it seems like something someone could easily write a module to do, or at least a script to parse the logs..
Because it requires the new SOI process which is more expensive than the standard CMOS processes. Currently DRAM probably doesn't use these more expensive processes (because they don't need to be as fast) so changing to ZRAM would be more expensive.
This works out to use arrays of pointers to arrays for all but the last dimension. So the code actually creates @A as an array of pointers to the other arrays (which perl calls references) The [ tell perl to return a reference. The ( tells perl to return a list. For a 3 dimensional array so prints "Help"
The first index tells it to select the array containing references to the arrays containing "Help" and "I'm". The second index selects the array containing "Help". The final dimension selects the string "Help" from the array. For me at least it helps to visualize it as a tree: With the first letter of each entry showing where it is on the tree. (^ added to preserve formatting through slashdot lameness filter...) So in summary you have the list @D = ("Help", "Me");. you grab a pointer to it and put it in another array as the first entry $C[0] = \@D;. Then you take a pointer to that and put it in the main array as the first entry $B[0] = \@C;. Then you repeat this for each element you want to add, putting them in the appropriate entry in each array. Voila you have a multidimensional array.
(Note that I have not tested any of this with perl5 since I don't have it on my work PC, so I may have some small typos, but the theory is correct)
Of course statically dimensioned arrays (in C anyway) are usually optimized by the compiler into a single array that use an index calculated by multiplying one of the dimensions size by the other dimensions index and then adding this result to the other index. This is actually faster in some cases (especially on x86 machines which support this via a single instruction) and avoids keeping the extra arrays of pointers.
IMHO OoO execution is not at all important for an embedded processor such as that found in a game system. Since the physical processor and system is known, instructions can be reordered by the compiler.
Additionally the Cell is not a traditional vector processor. Each of the 8 nodes can be made completely independent, and can function in a sort of SMP mode. I took a class in Parallel Computer Architecture last semester and we covered the Cell processor in detail.
While coding for the cell is very different from coding for other cpus I don't think it will require massive amounts of programmer work -- just careful research and design.
why bother transmitting position speed or direction of travel? Just transmit a pulse. The reciever can then calculate speed and position and direction of travel very easily. This way the minimum requirements of all cars is very very low -- just a transmitter on a timer. Just add a simple government requirement of it on all cars produced from today on, and in 20 years we could have a working system based on this principle.
"P.S. It is an intriguing fact that the first 6 base pairs of DNA before the first start codon in chromosome 1 (GATCAA) can be mapped directly on to the digits of pi in base 4. This suggests the code A=0, C=1, T=2, G=3."
I found this terribly funny...
6 digits of base 4 has less accuracy than 4 digits of base 10. So the value of "pi" parent was talking about was 3.140625
It means that your explanation doesn't really explain anything.
....
If it goes:
A occurred because of B
B occurred because of C
C occurred because of C
C occurred because of C
Does it really matter how many C's preceded the first C? Furthermore if you cut it anywhere after the second statement you're left with the same question, "Why did C occur?". So this provides no extra value to the argument. Why are the C's in an infinite sequence? Why did it suddenly (and apparently randomly) break away from repeating C's to cause B? Could it be that all those C's aren't really C's, but actually differ? If so what was the first instance that started it?
So in short infinite tail recursion is fine. Infinite head recursion can't exist without some terminating condition (implying a hidden state, which brings the question of what was the initial state (at time "negative infinity" or 0).
If there were 6 million English speakers with 330 million Spanish, I would learn Spanish (incidentally that's why I'm learning Chinese).
"Cultural heritage" is a sort of reactionary bullshit that people like to pull out so they can talk about how bad things are now. Culture constantly changes, merging or reacting with other cultures it meets. While you might say that some pieces of culture are "lost" in this process, they are usually just replaced by new pieces of culture that better fit the needs of the current society.
Of course these laws aren't about protecting culture anymore than they are about protecting freedom of speech.
As you said, it requires you to speak both French and English equally. If you want to speak Spanish or Japanese, that's just too bad -- only French is sacred. And that's only on commercial signs and products. If you decide to have a conversation in your own home you can speak whatever language you want (preserve your cultural heritage at home if you choose).
In short these laws are the cry of the buggy whip makers, the Intelligent Designers and many other groups finding that upon finding their power is fading they try to inact a law which inconveniences a lot of people, just to make them feel important again.
When you click something, it is activated NOW. When you move your mouse over something there is a delay before it is activated.
When I want to get something done, I want to get it done NOW. I can't stand the delay.
Furthermore making actions time-based means that it is impossible for you to stop in the middle of something, since the mouse would continue to select various things if it gets bumped around while you are doing something else.
There are really two types of standards:
Implementation Standards (which say that everyone should do things the exact same way)
Interoperability Standards (which say that everyone should do things such that others can understand them)
Most of the slashdot crowd are probably against the former (which creates a monoculture) and in favor of the latter.
At some point in an earlier discussion (a few weeks ago) someone brought up the effects of Methane as a greenhouse gas.
I haven't heard much about this (as CO2 gets most of the bad press), but a few articles I googled suggested that a given amount of methane has a vastly greater effect on the environment than the same amount of CO2.
I realize there is probably a lot more C02 out there, but if methane is such a big problem, why aren't we focusing more on capturing it (and maybe even using it for energy)?
Human activity produces a lot of methane (Wikipedia says 60% of global production.. -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane).
Why are we only focusing on CO2?
They would cost about the same.
Modern cell phones do most of their signal processing in software, so they have to have fairly beefy processors to begin with. So they basically already have the hardware to handle everything you mentioned. They're just trying to get the most use out of the hardware.
I don't know about GSM but with CDMA the clock needs to be accurately sync-ed to the network for communication to occur. So they just wrote a small program to display the time.
3D graphics could be easily implemented with the DSP chip the phones already use for communication (this chip isn't that busy when you're not talking on the phone..)...
Address books, and calendars are extra, but not hard to implement.
The biggest fluff on modern cell-phones are cameras, but those only add a ~$5 part.
What makes you think we're "glorifying these acts"?
. During this same period video games became more and more violent and more and more available. Additionally crime had been decreasing since 1997 (The year GoldenEye came out for the N64 and Carmageddon appeared on the PC). If anything these statistics would show a negative coorelation between violent video games and teen violence..
Video games don't say these acts are wonderful, great, christ-like or anything like that. The characters in the games ARE NOT role-models. How many children grow thinking they want to become a drug-dealer for a living (except of course for children who meet drug-dealers in real life). These characters get shot at. They die. I'm not sure how you can build a case for "glorifying" (if you can, I'd love to see it).
And what makes you think that restricting access to violent video games will reduce the amount of violent crime?
The most recent statistics I could find (from the US Department of Justice) showed that as of 2002 juvenile crime was at a 15 year low (http://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/ojjdp/204608.pdf)
How long after you started programming did you become what you would call a "good" programmer? (I know it took me at least 7 years...)
Though reversing a string seems like an interesting problem...
Though this solution doesn't work with multibyte character sets....
You had to have seen it. It wasn't violent or emotional or anything like that.
Mal calmly lays out this is what we're going to do and this how things will work, and then the bad guy is like I'm going to track you down and what not. Then Mal nonchalantly kicks the guy into the path of the engine intake and then picks up the next baddy in line and starts his speech over.
This sort of thing has been done before (but not to death), but the acting and scripting in this particular part was flawless IMHO...
It's even worse when the password systems aren't self-consistent.
At a company I used to work for I had a certain password: "!sw33th0m3Alabama~". Since I was a low-ranked engineer at the time, My office was provided an old Windows 98 system. My login and password worked perfectly that. Then one day I needed to login to one of the NT 4.0 machines in the lab. The NT machine wouldn't let me log on...After dealing with IT for an hour I told them to just to reset my password. I ended up changing it to "Pa55word". After that it worked....
I don't know what universe you crawled out of, but it bears no resemblence to mine....
1 - The principals are usually either lowly teachers (at most Masters-level graduates) or other random people that the school board happens to like. These people generally have no management skills or experience. Some of them don't know how to deal with the politics that can be avoided by lowly teachers. Some of them let the promotion go to their head and micromanage everything (after all they are the principal so they must know how things work better than those that didn't). For the type of job principals do, MBA's would probably be better able to deal with the administrative and political aspects and would be less likely to micromanage.
2 - The mandatory meetings (around here) are usually weekly to biweekly affairs that can last 3 or 4 hours. The non-hierarchal structure of school organization means that everything that needs to be discussed will be discussed during these meetings, whether its relevant to all members or not. This means that most of this meeting is completely irrelevant to the individuals present.
3 - The principal as more experience at what? Teaching 3rd graders math? 7th Grader's Spanish? Blind children colors? The fact is the principal is not all-knowing and probably only knows a bit about the specific subjects and grades that they taught. That they generally wave this around as generic years that are applicable from Algebra to Special Education only makes it worse.
4 - Tenure is meant to save good teachers from the whims of the current principal and school board. It accomplishes this job pretty well, but those untenured few who happen to come up for tenure at the wrong time are more likely to get fired than tenured (more likely than not for political reasons). And of course it also may keep bad teachers around too, but that was just a side effect...
5 - Sometimes there are team leaders. In primary schools, where every subject is generally taught by a single teacher, teachers are divided into grades and a leader is chosen. In schools where teachers only teach one subject, they are divided into departments and a leader is chosen. Of course being a team leader doesn't mean you get paid more, it only means you carry more responsibilities. Of course even though they're divided into teams, they all have to go to mandatory meetings to discuss everything...
Bad analogy.
A better analogy would be that car manufacturers should make light, efficient cars that can go hundreds of thousands of miles without any maintenance at all, and if they break down can be easily fixed using well documented interfaces.
If the car industry was run the same way Microsoft was run you'd see huge hulking cars that eat gas for breakfast and break down or are recalled often. When they break they require special proprietary equipment to be fixed.
Oh wait....
If you watch the video, it only tracks the white of the t-shirt. You can see this in the second part of the video where it shows the tracking area (which mostly consists of a rectangle around the shirt). So it can only attack people wearing bright white clothing.
...
While this is neat, it's not quite "The Quintessential Sentry Gun". Call me when you get better human-shape recognition....
So remember kids, when you go out burgularizing, Don't Wear White.
It's a long electromagnetic track that accelerates an object to escape velocity.
If it works it would be really fast and cheap (the pdf says $1 per pound....). It also should be less fragile than the space elevator (and easier to repair).
This sort of idea has been around for years. If you've read Heinlein's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress", this technology was used to launch stuff from the moon. Odd that nothing has come of it...
The OS has 100% control.
No application can overwrite another application without the OS's prior approval.
Norton Antivirus asks for the OS's approval before scanning applications. It can also ask the OS to stop running tasks (this has nothing to do with protecting memory spaces though...).
Debuggers and cheat programs ask the OS to let them modify running applications (debuggers do this to set breakpoints).
In this way the MMU will prevent accidental overwrites of other program's memory spaces. Of course if the application has already requested access to another application's address space and not yet told the OS that it is done, it could easily take that application down with it. And it doesn't work so well against intentional attacks. But if you run something in a sandbox, it means the OS refuses any requests to access the memory of other processes or tell processes to do anything.
Also programming language has nothing to do with these permissions. The operating system cannot tell a C program from a C++ program from an assembly program, since after compilation/assembly they're all machine code (which is all the OS sees). Even programs written in interpreted languages have to follow these rules (and maybe a few more).
That's not necessarily true.
You see, ever since the '286 (or was it the '386) came out systems have had "Memory Management Units". Now DOS didn't really use the MMU so anything could write whereever it felt like.
Modern operating systems make good use of the MMU. They use it mostly for virtual memory and paging, but also set permissions on segments of memory on a per application basis. This means that application A can't overwrite application B unless the operating system says it's ok...
If you ever had a program crash because of a "NULL pointer exception" or "Segfault" or "page fault exception" or "invalid page fault" then you've seen the results of this protection.
Nice post, except for one thing: Capacitance is not a limit on the voltage in a capacitor. Capacitance is just the ratio of stored charge to voltage. A higher capacitance means that it stores more charge at a given voltage.
What limits the voltage in a capacitor is the dielectric breakdown voltage. This is the voltage where the insulator between the two plates becomes conductive and arcing occurs.
But of course, even if the person involved did have a field that big, with a capacitance of 204pF they would only be storing 0.3264 Joules of energy (which couldn't increase the temperature of a gram of water by half a degree)...
Sorry to be a pedant, but the quote said "voltage" and you went off on "power".
The two are not analogous. Running with a lower voltage (at the same frequency) is based on the properties of the transistors and reflects a more advanced fabrication technique.
I don't know (and am too lazy to check) if the claims in that quote about voltage are true, but if they are then that means Intel has more room for growth in the future (which is probably more important to Apple than what is going on right now).