Like Gauntlet, only with RPG stats and more power-ups?
Holy shit, yes!
I've been trying to figure out what it was that Diablo brought to the table as far as genre is concerned over roguelikes. What else was it drawing influence from?
Then you come along and say what should have been obvious. Diablo = Rogue + Gauntlet. Randomly generated levels in an RPG based around leveling up and equipping your character, combined with a real-time button masher throwing yourself against an endless horde of largely identical enemies. And thus was the "Diablo clone" genre born.
Well to be serious for a moment, as a lover of both Nethack and Diablo II, I'd say it's worth distinguishing between these two genres. The things that are commonly called "roguelikes" are clearly aping rogue, and the Diablo Clones with their emphasis on real-time combat are clearly aping Diablo, by intent if nothing else. Diablo clearly owes a huge debt to Rogue-likes, but I wouldn't say it is one simply because it shakes up some of the fundamental gameplay principles. Even nethack is just adding much loved complexity and nuance on the same frame.
So, just like (to pick a random awesome example) Super Metroid was in a very real sense just an expansion of basic 2d platformer/shooter ideas from games like Castelvania and Contra, but it modernized and in the process shook up the concept enough to create something new and itself something that would be specifically replicated in the future.
If this is just a signature scanner, how can the author claim it will catch all 0-day exploits, even if the exploit was installed before the scanner was installed?
It's not just a signature scanner even by the GP's description, though. It's a RAM-cleanliness-verifier, and that part would work against 0-day exploits.
0-day rules out signature scanning. Detecting pre-installed exploits rules out check summing known good binaries. In short, while this is a clever method of determining that RAM is clean, I don't think it can do all of what the author claims.
It sounds like he's targeting embedded apps like mobile phones with fixed software stacks -- both the links at the end of the article go to other articles that talk specifically about "mobile malware". So if you can verify that RAM is clean, and therefore there is no malware resident to lie to you about things like the contents of flash, then you can pretty trivially compare the disk checksum to the known checksum of an uninfected software stack.
It sounds like this could very well be capable of detecting 0-day malware that is memory-resident on any system, and could detect 0-day malware of any kind (except suicidal) in a system with a known software stack. That latter might be a small (and boring imo) segment, but not an unimportant one.
At the very least, knowing there is no malware resident in RAM to lie to your anti-virus scanner would be a plus.
I concede on the engine fire, I had not seen the embedded link in the first article, only the one from the orlando site. So thanks
Embedded link? The description of the burn-out was in the main text of the article you linked yourself. Read it next time?
Still, my point was that if the first firing had failed on a NASA vehicle it would have been (correctly) called out for it, while anything NewSpace is fine and dandy and they can do no wrong. My "flagrance" is a result of this submitter always spinning his submissions and having conveient omissions (the first failure in this case).
No, I don't think they would have been called out for a minor pre-launch problem that resulted in a nominal abort, especially if the problem had nothing to do with the vehicle itself. Aborts happen for various minor problems all the time.
In contrast, SpaceX was called out and called out big time when on their first launch of the Falcon 1 the engine did actually catch fire and the rocket crashed into the ocean less than a kilometer away. People were questioning not just the competence of SpaceX, but the viability of private spaceflight in general!
So this impression you have that "anything NewSpace is fine and dandy and they can do no wrong" is just an illusion in your head with no bearing on reality.
But saying that DLC "causes me to pirate games" [emphasis mine] is utter nonsense.
I don't think it's nonsense to say that DLC causes him to pirate, as long as we're all clear that the cause-effect relationship was created by his brain, not the game companies.
"Talking about Open Source and Free Software as if they were the same causes RMS to go into apoplectic fits" is a reasonable statement. It should not be taken to mean that talking about them as if they were the same does or should cause everyone to have that reaction, or that RMS' militant pedantry was created by people confusing the terms.
He's just stating the obvious -- he's willing to pirate games that use DLC. Ergo, DLC in a game he would (hypothetically) otherwise buy causes him to pirate.
To relate things to the article, if it could be shown that Iran was indeed attacking CIA sites, would the US be justified in bombing Iranian intelligence facilities?
No, because in the highly unlikely case that these were actually CIA sites, they would have been clandestine sites posing as legitimate human rights sites.
You don't go to war over someone hacking your clandestine intelligence front sites any more than you would go to war over someone capturing one of your spies. You just write off the asset (or maybe in the case of spies quietly negotiate a trade for the spies of theirs that you've caught) and continue on.
Now if Iran tried to hack into the Pentagon, that's a different story. That could be considered an act of war. But no, I don't think merely DOSing the Pentagon's outward-facing PR website would count. I mean actually trying to infiltrate protected systems.
But that's nothing like what happened here. I'd bet the CIA's entire budget that what is really going on is that Iran is silencing opposition in their country, and blaming everything on America. Cus you know, that's what they've been doing for quite a while, and especially since the last election and the protests that followed. These websites are CIA fronts as much as every protester with a green armband is a CIA agent.
Covering up the fact that we're torturing people because it would make a lot of people upset to learn that is not a matter of national security.
Well, it is a matter of national security, just in the worst way. You see, if people found out what we were doing, they would hate us and possibly join organizations fighting us. Which is clearly bad for our national security.
Sadly I've heard people seriously use that argument as to why the revelations of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib were bad and the people responsible for the leaks should be punished.
Okay that all sounds pretty reasonable, but explain the What In The Name of Jeebus Is That Nebula, or the I Couldn't Even Begin To Explain What's Going On Here Quasar.
Yeah except he isn't even close to right, as anyone who bothered to read past even just the headline can see.
Human rights websites Iran claims were U.S. intelligence agency fronts != U.S. intelligence agency websites.
I think the scariest thing in all this isn't the possibility that he's right, it's the possibility that someone with his complete absence of critical thinking skills could actually be an intelligence analyst. Of course, he's no more an analyst than every website Iran doesn't like is a CIA front.
Yes, it is truly amazing how last week you didn't know what you're talking about, and this week you still don't. Wait, that's completely un-amazing.
No, what's amazing is how happily you'll believe the very people who would be our alleged enemies in this alleged cyberwar because it supports your thesis.
Did you even read past the headline that the sites brought down were Iranian human rights web sites, alleged by Iran to be "affiliated with U.S. espionage services"? Yeah, and all the Green Revolution protesters in Iran are actually U.S. agents deliberately fomenting revolt. Also, homosexuals do not exist in Iran and the Holocaust never happened. Official Iranian news sources said so.
Of course you want everyone to be able to play games with people who have downloaded the DLC! Obviously, you want them to see what they're missing by being a "have not".
This reminds me of the Descent 3 expansion pack, which introduced a new choice of ship to the existing 3 models, which was pretty much superior in every way. Even if you didn't buy the expansion pack, you could still play with people who had it and see their ship in all it's black and multi-missile-launching glory -- I can't remember if it utilized the content downloading system to get the model or what. The point is, they made sure not to "split the player base" because that way those without the expansion could get their asses handed to them by the new ship and go "I want that!"
Not splitting the player base is good for everyone, I'm just saying there's another motive here and it involves pushing the DLC.
This image linked to from the article shows the design of the falcon 9 + payload, and compares it to the Soyuz and the Shuttle.
That 54m is the total height including the payload capsule and the nosecone.
But really, who gives a shit about how tall it is? Look at that picture and the stats, and you see the real comparison, the thing is way smaller than the shuttle stack (pile? Jenga game? what do you call a non-stacked stack?). Mass is much lower, but so is payload capacity -- about 16% the mass, and 43% of the payload to LEO. So it goes with rockets.
Who said I was pro Ares? Thanks for making stuff up!
It was just an inference of the motivation for your flagrant lies. I mean, it's possible you're just an idiot, so yeah, GP was jumping to conclusions.
I just said that if it had been Ares, that it would have been pointed out. I can't stand biased articles and submissions - Ares, SpaceX, or otherwise.
Well you flagrantly misrepresented what the article you linked to said in a way that says anti-SpaceX bias, so...
"Flames at the launch pad erupted when computers cut off an engine test of the Spacex Falcon 9 rocket."
As the first article you linked to explicitly explained, this was a normal clearing of fuel that was in the lines after shutoff, not the engines about to catch fire as you claimed in the first post.
"The engines did not ignite and there was no engine fire." That's a direct quote from the article you linked, and a direct contradiction of what you said. So...
Holy crap. I mean, I was a little dissappointed by the iPad, but geeze these guys must be seriously pissed* to actually get one and then vaporize it with a rocket engine! Get a grip, fellas. Not everything Apple does is going to be awesome.
While it might be true that any application will take up at least a byte of memory, there is no reason malware couldn't masquerade as another binary down to the exact number of bytes.
Oh see he didn't finish explaining.
Any program that wants to be resident has to occupy at least one byte of RAM. And that byte should include the Evil Bit, which all malware should set. Then your anti-virus program just checks the Evil Bit and problem solved!
Well, this depends on what NASA is for. I think all the solar system exploration is great for science, but NASA's job should be primarily about human flight and that's being de-emphasized.
The kind of human space flight we're capable of now is the kind that can and should be handled by private industry. The kind of space flight we should be doing in the future will only happen with pure research and advanced technology development of new forms of propulsion, like NASA is doing. Human flight is only deemphasized in the near term, and only in the sense that it is going to be handled privately.
Personally I think NASA's purpose should be expanding the limits our capabilities in space. Building Yet Another Rocket is not that. Putting another human on the moon so that we can say that we can (still) do it is not that. JPL is that. The research the new program advocates is that.
The problem is that if your stance is that NASA should be doing human space flight, like, now, then the only kind of human mission we could begin designing, like, now, is basically an Apollo repeat. Which is useless and pointless, imo.
Yeah, and the smart money in space right now is probably in building automatic moondust-to-habitats machines.
Which is exactly where I was going to go with my post if I hadn't been about to run out the door. The thing is, what NASA is going to be focusing on are exactly the kinds of things we'll need to make that lunar habitat possible -- in-vacuum and microgravity assembly/manufacturing, robotic assembly, and all that stuff plus surveying the moon and identifying the useful stuff like water to make fuel.
I think the proposed plan does the best job of fulfilling our "responsibility to maintain its leadership in technology and its moral leadership... to seek knowledge.". I mean, it's all about technology and seeking knowledge. It's about doing things technologically that haven't been done before, not just engineering yet another rocket. We've kinda already acquired that knowledge, and it's fully baked enough to be put in the hands of private industry now. Instead focus on the kinds of things that JPL has been working on with minimal budget on the side and that have really pushed technology and increased our knowledge of the solar system.
It's only sad if he's the last one to ever land on the moon. I hope that when we do it's for more than to put boots down.
It creates a ring formation in the area, and it was also only recently discovered. Half of the crater is in the water, the other half of the crater is on land. Also, very close to this area, people theorize that the "gulf of mexico" was an impact crater that might've caused the dinosaurs to die. The yucatan peninsula sure has an odd shape, and in the water, it almost forms a circle around the gulf of mexico.
Are you talking about Chicxulub, mentioned in the sidebar in TFA and half in the Gulf? That's the one I've heard of as being the mark of the suspected dinosaur killer, which makes sense as TFA mentions it's dated at 65 million years old.
As far as the Yucatan/Gulf itself, I've heard it suggested that it's a crater before but I don't know how well that holds up geologically. But damn that would have been a hell of an impact; a lot bigger than the KT extinction I'd wager.
Actually I have to change my stance. There has been a good argument made in this thread that a "thermal diode" wouldn't violate thermodynamics any more than an ideal insulator would (and we assume ideal insulators in models all the time without creating perpetual motion machines).
The real violation is when you have two regions of equal temperature, and you move heat from one to the other without spending more energy than what you're moving, creating a heat differential out of nothing and decreasing entropy. A one-way thermal conductor would still only move heat from a high region to a cold region, so it only works if you already have a potential across the conductor (much like an electrical diode), and only results in increased entropy.
So if I try to sue a big corporation, and they decide to run up the court costs into the millions, I'm screwed if I lose? I may as well not sue, no matter how legitimate my claim.
"Loser Pays" only makes sense to people operating under the bizarre delusion that the "winner" and "loser" in a court case are always going to be the same as the one who was right and wrong. Frivolous lawsuits will result in the litigant losing their shirts, and just lawsuits will still prevail.
It's gotta be a lack of experience with the legal system, because just about the first thing any lawyer you hire will do is disabuse you of the notion that being right means being victorious. So even if you walked into the lawyer's office not concerned about paying the other side's fees, once they explain that at the end of it all you may have nothing to show for your efforts but wasted time and money, and that you'll have to pay the other side's costs too, you can bet that'll have a chilling effect on most rational people.
Oh and speaking of rationality, it seems like the "loser pays" advocates have a vastly different impression of what constitutes a frivolous lawsuit or what type of person pursues them than I. What I consider to be a frivolous litigant seems on average to be exactly the kind of person who would ignore the reality their lawyer tries to inject into their head. They're exactly the kind of person who wouldn't care about "loser pays", because they're just so damn sure that cell tower was causing their impotence, or that Three's Company reruns gave them cancer, and they just know that if they get Their Day in Court, then surely The Truth Will Out.
I will certainly agree that while the phrasing in the summary is correct if interpreted a certain (valid) way, it was a poor choice of words because it gives the wrong impression when interpreted the way that most people, even the scientifically minded, would take it in context.
Also, I think it's quite possible that whoever wrote that copy was not aware of the nuances we're discussing, and that "direction" in the sense they meant it is the one where the statement is simply wrong.:)
Speaking of both being correct, the notion of a vector's direction can be considered both in the context of the line the vector follows combined with its sign, or separate.
For example if you define your vector in terms of 2d polar coordinates, Theta is your direction, and the magnitude could be positive or negative. It's just usually we define the direction of a vector such that its magnitude is positive.
You can also obviously refer to the sign-independent sense of direction as the dimension since you can obviously define a set of dimensions such that one of them is the line the vector is on. However you probably wouldn't refer to it that way if you've already defined your coordinate system, since otherwise saying "in one dimension" would imply that the vector is parallel to one of the pre-defined axis.
Long story short, pretty much every poster in this thread has used the terms correctly. The only people who are wrong are those who say someone else was using it wrong for not using it their way, because there are multiple ways to use these terms.
Slashdot Mirror
Like Gauntlet, only with RPG stats and more power-ups?
Holy shit, yes!
I've been trying to figure out what it was that Diablo brought to the table as far as genre is concerned over roguelikes. What else was it drawing influence from?
Then you come along and say what should have been obvious. Diablo = Rogue + Gauntlet. Randomly generated levels in an RPG based around leveling up and equipping your character, combined with a real-time button masher throwing yourself against an endless horde of largely identical enemies. And thus was the "Diablo clone" genre born.
"Diablo clone"? The proper term is "roguelike".
Well to be serious for a moment, as a lover of both Nethack and Diablo II, I'd say it's worth distinguishing between these two genres. The things that are commonly called "roguelikes" are clearly aping rogue, and the Diablo Clones with their emphasis on real-time combat are clearly aping Diablo, by intent if nothing else. Diablo clearly owes a huge debt to Rogue-likes, but I wouldn't say it is one simply because it shakes up some of the fundamental gameplay principles. Even nethack is just adding much loved complexity and nuance on the same frame.
So, just like (to pick a random awesome example) Super Metroid was in a very real sense just an expansion of basic 2d platformer/shooter ideas from games like Castelvania and Contra, but it modernized and in the process shook up the concept enough to create something new and itself something that would be specifically replicated in the future.
If this is just a signature scanner, how can the author claim it will catch all 0-day exploits, even if the exploit was installed before the scanner was installed?
It's not just a signature scanner even by the GP's description, though. It's a RAM-cleanliness-verifier, and that part would work against 0-day exploits.
0-day rules out signature scanning. Detecting pre-installed exploits rules out check summing known good binaries. In short, while this is a clever method of determining that RAM is clean, I don't think it can do all of what the author claims.
It sounds like he's targeting embedded apps like mobile phones with fixed software stacks -- both the links at the end of the article go to other articles that talk specifically about "mobile malware". So if you can verify that RAM is clean, and therefore there is no malware resident to lie to you about things like the contents of flash, then you can pretty trivially compare the disk checksum to the known checksum of an uninfected software stack.
It sounds like this could very well be capable of detecting 0-day malware that is memory-resident on any system, and could detect 0-day malware of any kind (except suicidal) in a system with a known software stack. That latter might be a small (and boring imo) segment, but not an unimportant one.
At the very least, knowing there is no malware resident in RAM to lie to your anti-virus scanner would be a plus.
How are they going to top DS's brutality
Easy!
bloodSpurtAmount *= 10;
and innovate features?
Uh...
bloodSpurtAmount *= 20;
I concede on the engine fire, I had not seen the embedded link in the first article, only the one from the orlando site. So thanks
Embedded link? The description of the burn-out was in the main text of the article you linked yourself. Read it next time?
Still, my point was that if the first firing had failed on a NASA vehicle it would have been (correctly) called out for it, while anything NewSpace is fine and dandy and they can do no wrong. My "flagrance" is a result of this submitter always spinning his submissions and having conveient omissions (the first failure in this case).
No, I don't think they would have been called out for a minor pre-launch problem that resulted in a nominal abort, especially if the problem had nothing to do with the vehicle itself. Aborts happen for various minor problems all the time.
In contrast, SpaceX was called out and called out big time when on their first launch of the Falcon 1 the engine did actually catch fire and the rocket crashed into the ocean less than a kilometer away. People were questioning not just the competence of SpaceX, but the viability of private spaceflight in general!
So this impression you have that "anything NewSpace is fine and dandy and they can do no wrong" is just an illusion in your head with no bearing on reality.
But saying that DLC "causes me to pirate games" [emphasis mine] is utter nonsense.
I don't think it's nonsense to say that DLC causes him to pirate, as long as we're all clear that the cause-effect relationship was created by his brain, not the game companies.
"Talking about Open Source and Free Software as if they were the same causes RMS to go into apoplectic fits" is a reasonable statement. It should not be taken to mean that talking about them as if they were the same does or should cause everyone to have that reaction, or that RMS' militant pedantry was created by people confusing the terms.
He's just stating the obvious -- he's willing to pirate games that use DLC. Ergo, DLC in a game he would (hypothetically) otherwise buy causes him to pirate.
And yes, it's a flimsy and pathetic excuse.
To relate things to the article, if it could be shown that Iran was indeed attacking CIA sites, would the US be justified in bombing Iranian intelligence facilities?
No, because in the highly unlikely case that these were actually CIA sites, they would have been clandestine sites posing as legitimate human rights sites.
You don't go to war over someone hacking your clandestine intelligence front sites any more than you would go to war over someone capturing one of your spies. You just write off the asset (or maybe in the case of spies quietly negotiate a trade for the spies of theirs that you've caught) and continue on.
Now if Iran tried to hack into the Pentagon, that's a different story. That could be considered an act of war. But no, I don't think merely DOSing the Pentagon's outward-facing PR website would count. I mean actually trying to infiltrate protected systems.
But that's nothing like what happened here. I'd bet the CIA's entire budget that what is really going on is that Iran is silencing opposition in their country, and blaming everything on America. Cus you know, that's what they've been doing for quite a while, and especially since the last election and the protests that followed. These websites are CIA fronts as much as every protester with a green armband is a CIA agent.
Covering up the fact that we're torturing people because it would make a lot of people upset to learn that is not a matter of national security.
Well, it is a matter of national security, just in the worst way. You see, if people found out what we were doing, they would hate us and possibly join organizations fighting us. Which is clearly bad for our national security.
Sadly I've heard people seriously use that argument as to why the revelations of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib were bad and the people responsible for the leaks should be punished.
Okay that all sounds pretty reasonable, but explain the What In The Name of Jeebus Is That Nebula, or the I Couldn't Even Begin To Explain What's Going On Here Quasar.
Yeah except he isn't even close to right, as anyone who bothered to read past even just the headline can see.
Human rights websites Iran claims were U.S. intelligence agency fronts != U.S. intelligence agency websites.
I think the scariest thing in all this isn't the possibility that he's right, it's the possibility that someone with his complete absence of critical thinking skills could actually be an intelligence analyst. Of course, he's no more an analyst than every website Iran doesn't like is a CIA front.
Yes, it is truly amazing how last week you didn't know what you're talking about, and this week you still don't. Wait, that's completely un-amazing.
No, what's amazing is how happily you'll believe the very people who would be our alleged enemies in this alleged cyberwar because it supports your thesis.
Did you even read past the headline that the sites brought down were Iranian human rights web sites, alleged by Iran to be "affiliated with U.S. espionage services"? Yeah, and all the Green Revolution protesters in Iran are actually U.S. agents deliberately fomenting revolt. Also, homosexuals do not exist in Iran and the Holocaust never happened. Official Iranian news sources said so.
Of course you want everyone to be able to play games with people who have downloaded the DLC! Obviously, you want them to see what they're missing by being a "have not".
This reminds me of the Descent 3 expansion pack, which introduced a new choice of ship to the existing 3 models, which was pretty much superior in every way. Even if you didn't buy the expansion pack, you could still play with people who had it and see their ship in all it's black and multi-missile-launching glory -- I can't remember if it utilized the content downloading system to get the model or what. The point is, they made sure not to "split the player base" because that way those without the expansion could get their asses handed to them by the new ship and go "I want that!"
Not splitting the player base is good for everyone, I'm just saying there's another motive here and it involves pushing the DLC.
This image linked to from the article shows the design of the falcon 9 + payload, and compares it to the Soyuz and the Shuttle.
That 54m is the total height including the payload capsule and the nosecone.
But really, who gives a shit about how tall it is? Look at that picture and the stats, and you see the real comparison, the thing is way smaller than the shuttle stack (pile? Jenga game? what do you call a non-stacked stack?). Mass is much lower, but so is payload capacity -- about 16% the mass, and 43% of the payload to LEO. So it goes with rockets.
Who said I was pro Ares? Thanks for making stuff up!
It was just an inference of the motivation for your flagrant lies. I mean, it's possible you're just an idiot, so yeah, GP was jumping to conclusions.
I just said that if it had been Ares, that it would have been pointed out. I can't stand biased articles and submissions - Ares, SpaceX, or otherwise.
Well you flagrantly misrepresented what the article you linked to said in a way that says anti-SpaceX bias, so...
"Flames at the launch pad erupted when computers cut off an engine test of the Spacex Falcon 9 rocket."
As the first article you linked to explicitly explained, this was a normal clearing of fuel that was in the lines after shutoff, not the engines about to catch fire as you claimed in the first post.
"The engines did not ignite and there was no engine fire." That's a direct quote from the article you linked, and a direct contradiction of what you said. So...
They're test-firing the Falcon 9 on an iPad?
Holy crap. I mean, I was a little dissappointed by the iPad, but geeze these guys must be seriously pissed* to actually get one and then vaporize it with a rocket engine! Get a grip, fellas. Not everything Apple does is going to be awesome.
* Maybe in both American and British senses.
While it might be true that any application will take up at least a byte of memory, there is no reason malware couldn't masquerade as another binary down to the exact number of bytes.
Oh see he didn't finish explaining.
Any program that wants to be resident has to occupy at least one byte of RAM. And that byte should include the Evil Bit, which all malware should set. Then your anti-virus program just checks the Evil Bit and problem solved!
Well, this depends on what NASA is for. I think all the solar system exploration is great for science, but NASA's job should be primarily about human flight and that's being de-emphasized.
The kind of human space flight we're capable of now is the kind that can and should be handled by private industry. The kind of space flight we should be doing in the future will only happen with pure research and advanced technology development of new forms of propulsion, like NASA is doing. Human flight is only deemphasized in the near term, and only in the sense that it is going to be handled privately.
Personally I think NASA's purpose should be expanding the limits our capabilities in space. Building Yet Another Rocket is not that. Putting another human on the moon so that we can say that we can (still) do it is not that. JPL is that. The research the new program advocates is that.
The problem is that if your stance is that NASA should be doing human space flight, like, now, then the only kind of human mission we could begin designing, like, now, is basically an Apollo repeat. Which is useless and pointless, imo.
Yeah, and the smart money in space right now is probably in building automatic moondust-to-habitats machines.
Which is exactly where I was going to go with my post if I hadn't been about to run out the door. The thing is, what NASA is going to be focusing on are exactly the kinds of things we'll need to make that lunar habitat possible -- in-vacuum and microgravity assembly/manufacturing, robotic assembly, and all that stuff plus surveying the moon and identifying the useful stuff like water to make fuel.
I think the proposed plan does the best job of fulfilling our "responsibility to maintain its leadership in technology and its moral leadership... to seek knowledge.". I mean, it's all about technology and seeking knowledge. It's about doing things technologically that haven't been done before, not just engineering yet another rocket. We've kinda already acquired that knowledge, and it's fully baked enough to be put in the hands of private industry now. Instead focus on the kinds of things that JPL has been working on with minimal budget on the side and that have really pushed technology and increased our knowledge of the solar system.
It's only sad if he's the last one to ever land on the moon. I hope that when we do it's for more than to put boots down.
It creates a ring formation in the area, and it was also only recently discovered. Half of the crater is in the water, the other half of the crater is on land. Also, very close to this area, people theorize that the "gulf of mexico" was an impact crater that might've caused the dinosaurs to die. The yucatan peninsula sure has an odd shape, and in the water, it almost forms a circle around the gulf of mexico.
Are you talking about Chicxulub, mentioned in the sidebar in TFA and half in the Gulf? That's the one I've heard of as being the mark of the suspected dinosaur killer, which makes sense as TFA mentions it's dated at 65 million years old.
As far as the Yucatan/Gulf itself, I've heard it suggested that it's a crater before but I don't know how well that holds up geologically. But damn that would have been a hell of an impact; a lot bigger than the KT extinction I'd wager.
Actually I have to change my stance. There has been a good argument made in this thread that a "thermal diode" wouldn't violate thermodynamics any more than an ideal insulator would (and we assume ideal insulators in models all the time without creating perpetual motion machines).
The real violation is when you have two regions of equal temperature, and you move heat from one to the other without spending more energy than what you're moving, creating a heat differential out of nothing and decreasing entropy. A one-way thermal conductor would still only move heat from a high region to a cold region, so it only works if you already have a potential across the conductor (much like an electrical diode), and only results in increased entropy.
So if I try to sue a big corporation, and they decide to run up the court costs into the millions, I'm screwed if I lose? I may as well not sue, no matter how legitimate my claim.
"Loser Pays" only makes sense to people operating under the bizarre delusion that the "winner" and "loser" in a court case are always going to be the same as the one who was right and wrong. Frivolous lawsuits will result in the litigant losing their shirts, and just lawsuits will still prevail.
It's gotta be a lack of experience with the legal system, because just about the first thing any lawyer you hire will do is disabuse you of the notion that being right means being victorious. So even if you walked into the lawyer's office not concerned about paying the other side's fees, once they explain that at the end of it all you may have nothing to show for your efforts but wasted time and money, and that you'll have to pay the other side's costs too, you can bet that'll have a chilling effect on most rational people.
Oh and speaking of rationality, it seems like the "loser pays" advocates have a vastly different impression of what constitutes a frivolous lawsuit or what type of person pursues them than I. What I consider to be a frivolous litigant seems on average to be exactly the kind of person who would ignore the reality their lawyer tries to inject into their head. They're exactly the kind of person who wouldn't care about "loser pays", because they're just so damn sure that cell tower was causing their impotence, or that Three's Company reruns gave them cancer, and they just know that if they get Their Day in Court, then surely The Truth Will Out.
Well, the leading theories right now are that it was either Superman crashing to earth at hypersonic speeds, or your mom playing hopscotch.
Scientist: Everyone, listen! I've made an amazing discovery: We're all doomed!
Everyone: Yay!
I will certainly agree that while the phrasing in the summary is correct if interpreted a certain (valid) way, it was a poor choice of words because it gives the wrong impression when interpreted the way that most people, even the scientifically minded, would take it in context.
Also, I think it's quite possible that whoever wrote that copy was not aware of the nuances we're discussing, and that "direction" in the sense they meant it is the one where the statement is simply wrong. :)
Speaking of both being correct, the notion of a vector's direction can be considered both in the context of the line the vector follows combined with its sign, or separate.
For example if you define your vector in terms of 2d polar coordinates, Theta is your direction, and the magnitude could be positive or negative. It's just usually we define the direction of a vector such that its magnitude is positive.
You can also obviously refer to the sign-independent sense of direction as the dimension since you can obviously define a set of dimensions such that one of them is the line the vector is on. However you probably wouldn't refer to it that way if you've already defined your coordinate system, since otherwise saying "in one dimension" would imply that the vector is parallel to one of the pre-defined axis.
Long story short, pretty much every poster in this thread has used the terms correctly. The only people who are wrong are those who say someone else was using it wrong for not using it their way, because there are multiple ways to use these terms.