Google's search results are based on how popular a link is under the assumption that if a link is popular, it contains useful content.
Wrong.
The assumption is that if a link is popular, it is more likely to be what a person searching for that term wants to find. Which is a completely separate question from whether the content is "useful". Only a fraction of internet searches are for something "useful", and trying to restrict search responses to what is useful would be contrary to what the user wants.
For a great many people googling "Santorum", the hilarious take-down of his bigotted views is exactly what they wanted to find.
If you just google "Santorum" because you want to know more about the guy, then finding out what the Internet thinks of him is quite relevant.
If you are interested in "useful" information about his campaign or platform, then googling "Santorum campaign" or "Santorum Presidential Candidate" or so on would provide specifically that information.
That's gaming the search engine--that's what it means to game a search engine.
No it isn't. To game the search engine would mean to make a link appear more popular than it really is. If the link is legitimately popular, then that's not gaming the system, even if the link's popularity does not imply whatever else you might assume about the link.
The budget for human space flight is more than thrice that for science. NASA is going to spend over $20B on the "new" SLS system for two launches through 2020.
SLS != human space flight.
Prior to Congress mandating the Pork Launcher, the plan for human space flight involved a long-term plan to develop basic technologies that would make human spaceflight -- or any spaceflight -- easier and cheaper. Specifically developing in-orbit re-fueling and assembly capability, allowing NASA to focus on the trip from earth orbit to elsewhere, while allowing private industry -- for whom orbital capability is already economically feasible -- to handle the first part of the trip as a commodity. This plan, in as much as its components weren't already scientific in nature, did not cripple funding of science at NASA.
It's the Pork Launcher that's the problem. The Pork Launcher is not only killing science at NASA, it's killing the plan that would have obviated the need for the stupid thing in the first place.
The fact that Webb went over budget because Congress didn't provide timely funding is rarely mentioned; Congress simply blames the agency.
If this satellite hadn't been built and launched by NASA in the first place then this post might make a lick of sense. As it is: NASA has a finite budget, NASA sometimes has to end programs due to lack of funds to continue them even though the hardware is still working, and letting some private organization use the hardware is better than not using it at all.
NASA develops, launches, and runs a satellite for a while and then a university acquires the satellite that they could never have afforded to develop or launch on their own for free.
And so the antidote to your "lose-lose" situation is, in fact, reality.
As stated above in "Lose lose", I fail to see how this benefits anyone. NASA ( or ESA, for that matter ) is payed only a fraction, if anything at all, for old equipment.
A fantastic instrument -- that is already paid for -- continues to be used to advance scientific knowledge instead of just floating uselessly around the earth until its orbit decays.
You fail to see how this benefits anyone?
Are you mental, or do you just not see any value in astronomy to begin with?
The same thing that kept you from making copies of all your physical media before reselling it. That little voice in your head.
It's true. The little voice in my head keeps me far too busy killing the demons that look like people to bother making illegal copies of my media, physical or digital.
You can't, remember copyright? I have to give a "right to copy" a permission or a license to distribute my digital goods. Software, recordings, photos etc. are all covered here and copyright makes any second-hand market or distribution illegal by default unless authorized by the copyright holders.
I heard there was a recent court ruling that found otherwise, saying that at least in the case of mp3s that they constitute 'material objects' and are thus subject to the First Sale Doctrine exception to the distribution right.
I get heated over this kind of thing every time I pop in a DVD from Netflix. They send you discs without any special features that are loaded with up to 15 minutes of unskippable advertisements and previews. If I had just downloaded the move, I could jump right in. I am willing to pay, but I see nothing but disincentives to do so! Fools.
If you popped the DVD into a Linux system and used one of the Linux players, then you could skip all of that stuff since they ignore the "unskippable" bit.
It's still illegal, since it depends on the DeCSS code for breaking the encryption (fuck you DMCA). Morally, though, it's perfectly fine.
Does Netflix streaming service do that? I have only limited experience with it, when a friend used his account to stream movies to the Wii that another friend had brought, and I don't recall any ads unskippable or otherwise.
There is no compelling business case for private space. It's already handled by a few corporations who deal with reality.
LOL, yeah, the existing launch companies are "dealing with reality", but the company that's going to come along and eat their lunch with significantly lower launch costs is delusional.
I doubt you'll see fewer satellites launched once launch costs go down.
And like it or not, NASA wants rockets to go to the ISS with people in them and that's just reality. They'll probably have uses for rockets like the ones SpaceX is building (manned or not) after the ISS program ends, and this is also reality.
*BUT*, there comes a massive performance penalty which is that the clock rate now has to be twice as fast as a RISC processor in order to achieve the same results.
That's just complete bollocks.
A modern x86 processor (meaning... since the Pentium Pro in the mid 90s) is, internally, a RISC-like core with full OoO execution and so on and so forth.
Variable instruction decode is a pain in the ass and does add latency in the front end. This isn't great, but it is nowhere near a 50% reduction in IPC. Try more like 1-2% (measured via correlated cycle-accurate performance simulator), depending on how clever you get and in any case easily made up for by a clever widget or two.
Basically predictions of RISC eating x86 for breakfast were made over 15 years ago and never came to pass. Mostly by x86 morphing so that the difference was essentially irrelevant.
Your talk about northbridges sounds woefully out of date, too. This has nothing to do with ISA, and both major x86 vendors now have integrated northbridges.
You're closer to reality when talking about power. Regardless of the small IPC penalty, those decoders burn up a lot of power. There are ways to get around this, too, and for moderate perf moderate low power x86 does just fine. At the very low end of power, though, going to something like ARM makes sense.
Are you suggesting that mass is converted into energy in a chemical reaction?
Matter isn't converted into energy, but if energy is released then so is mass (as we normally think of it, like it causes stuff to weigh more on a scale and have more inertia and so forth).
Hey look another idiot like the OP who thinks "Do the math!" means use vague qualitative statements!
Guess what, "ginormous" and "miniscule" have different meanings when talking about the scale of the earth, and the energy received by the sun. The sun dumps thousands of metric tonnes worth of energy on the earth every year. The earth masses at around 10^24 kg. 160 tonnes is in fact minuscule. It can't realistically be accounted for just by atmospheric heating, but that's not the same thing as saying it's completely unrealistic.
Dude, your math is WAY off. How'd you go from mass to required energy without determining the specific heat of the earth?
Here, let me calculate the energy required to heat just the iron content of the earth (34.6% by mass) by 1 C: 9.278* 10^26 J, which is equivalent to 1.037 & 10^7 metric tonnes.
You are off by a LOT of decimal places. A mere 23kJ should have immediately tipped you off as not passing the smell test. That's less than 1/1000th of the energy released by burning 1 liter of gasoline!
The calculations are below in the thread. It is off by 3 orders of magnitude if you look at only atmospheric heating.
Then don't just look at only atmospheric heating.
Of course that gets more complicated... maybe our napkin engineering isn't up to the task and it would take more time -- like enough time to write a research paper -- to come up with a more credible answer.
They are not, however, assuming the entire core (or even a significant fraction of the planet below the surface) gets heated to arrive at that number.
The earth is 34.6% iron. That would mean 9.278E26 J to heat just the iron content of earth by 1 degree, which means 1.032E7 metric tonnes.
It is a fallacy that the US lost in Vietnam, although they did later "lose" Vietnam itself (there is a difference).
Right we only lost in the only way that is relevant because the entire goal of the Vietnam conflict was not to lose South Vietnam to Communism. That goal was not achieved. We lost.
We "didn't lose" in a sense that is completely irrelevant because were it not for the strategic motivation for entering the conflict -- which was a failure -- then the military "wins" never would have occurred.
So, South Vietnam was lost to US interests but the US forces were actually unbeaten in the field when they left, and had destroyed the Viet Cong (but were not permitted to destroy the North Vietnamese Army for political reasons, although it was well within US capabilities).
Of course. All we would have had to do was treat Vietnam as if it was World War II and our war machine would have rolled over the NVA.
Too bad this wasn't Word War II, and the politics surrounding it, the whole reason we were there, made things more complicated and changed the meaning of "win" to something other than simply achieving military success at any cost.
Like every conflict we've been engaged in since other than Desert Storm.
We lost Vietnam exactly because we didn't understand how to use the military in a situation where winning militarily and winning in actuality were not the same thing.
My take-away is that we're going to have to kick Global Warming into high-gear in order to counteract the much more serious (and embarrassing) Global Shrinkage!
It would take thousands to millions of years for a one degree average surface temperature change to work it's way through the entire planet.
So what? If the entire damn planet, core and everything, heated up by 1 degree the result would be a damn lot more than 160 tons of extra mass-energy!
The calculation is based simply on the estimated amount of excess solar energy retained. It has nothing to do with whether or not the energy spreads through the earth. The energy is already here, increasing the earth's mass.
Slashdot Mirror
Google's search results are based on how popular a link is under the assumption that if a link is popular, it contains useful content.
Wrong.
The assumption is that if a link is popular, it is more likely to be what a person searching for that term wants to find. Which is a completely separate question from whether the content is "useful". Only a fraction of internet searches are for something "useful", and trying to restrict search responses to what is useful would be contrary to what the user wants.
For a great many people googling "Santorum", the hilarious take-down of his bigotted views is exactly what they wanted to find.
If you just google "Santorum" because you want to know more about the guy, then finding out what the Internet thinks of him is quite relevant.
If you are interested in "useful" information about his campaign or platform, then googling "Santorum campaign" or "Santorum Presidential Candidate" or so on would provide specifically that information.
That's gaming the search engine--that's what it means to game a search engine.
No it isn't. To game the search engine would mean to make a link appear more popular than it really is. If the link is legitimately popular, then that's not gaming the system, even if the link's popularity does not imply whatever else you might assume about the link.
The budget for human space flight is more than thrice that for science. NASA is going to spend over $20B on the "new" SLS system for two launches through 2020.
SLS != human space flight.
Prior to Congress mandating the Pork Launcher, the plan for human space flight involved a long-term plan to develop basic technologies that would make human spaceflight -- or any spaceflight -- easier and cheaper. Specifically developing in-orbit re-fueling and assembly capability, allowing NASA to focus on the trip from earth orbit to elsewhere, while allowing private industry -- for whom orbital capability is already economically feasible -- to handle the first part of the trip as a commodity. This plan, in as much as its components weren't already scientific in nature, did not cripple funding of science at NASA.
It's the Pork Launcher that's the problem. The Pork Launcher is not only killing science at NASA, it's killing the plan that would have obviated the need for the stupid thing in the first place.
The fact that Webb went over budget because Congress didn't provide timely funding is rarely mentioned; Congress simply blames the agency.
Of course and the media just runs with it.
If this satellite hadn't been built and launched by NASA in the first place then this post might make a lick of sense. As it is: NASA has a finite budget, NASA sometimes has to end programs due to lack of funds to continue them even though the hardware is still working, and letting some private organization use the hardware is better than not using it at all.
NASA develops, launches, and runs a satellite for a while and then a university acquires the satellite that they could never have afforded to develop or launch on their own for free.
And so the antidote to your "lose-lose" situation is, in fact, reality.
As stated above in "Lose lose", I fail to see how this benefits anyone. NASA ( or ESA, for that matter ) is payed only a fraction, if anything at all, for old equipment.
A fantastic instrument -- that is already paid for -- continues to be used to advance scientific knowledge instead of just floating uselessly around the earth until its orbit decays.
You fail to see how this benefits anyone?
Are you mental, or do you just not see any value in astronomy to begin with?
So does whatever moron wrote that line.
The same thing that kept you from making copies of all your physical media before reselling it. That little voice in your head.
It's true. The little voice in my head keeps me far too busy killing the demons that look like people to bother making illegal copies of my media, physical or digital.
You can't, remember copyright? I have to give a "right to copy" a permission or a license to distribute my digital goods. Software, recordings, photos etc. are all covered here and copyright makes any second-hand market or distribution illegal by default unless authorized by the copyright holders.
I heard there was a recent court ruling that found otherwise, saying that at least in the case of mp3s that they constitute 'material objects' and are thus subject to the First Sale Doctrine exception to the distribution right.
I can't remember where I heard this though.
Sorry, if you intentionally leave out material information, it is deliberate deception and thus morally equivalent to lying.
"Lying by omission is not lying" is exactly the kind of lie a liar would tell to help cover and excuse their lies.
It is exactly this kind of lie of omission that Satan, Prince of Lies, is most often depicted as telling.
If they keep the decibel level down, it's none of your damn business.
Why do they have keep the decibel level down? You fascist.
I liked Cracked.com's description of litterbox training (paraphrase)
"Teaching a cat to use a litter box is a simple two step process:
1) Show them the litter box.
2) That's it.
"
The hookers and blow keep on a-comin', and they see nothing wrong with that.
So with any luck, their dealer and/or pimp will be trying to play Splinter Cell next week, and cut Ubisoft off in their rage at being unable to play!
I get heated over this kind of thing every time I pop in a DVD from Netflix. They send you discs without any special features that are loaded with up to 15 minutes of unskippable advertisements and previews. If I had just downloaded the move, I could jump right in. I am willing to pay, but I see nothing but disincentives to do so! Fools.
If you popped the DVD into a Linux system and used one of the Linux players, then you could skip all of that stuff since they ignore the "unskippable" bit.
It's still illegal, since it depends on the DeCSS code for breaking the encryption (fuck you DMCA). Morally, though, it's perfectly fine.
Does Netflix streaming service do that? I have only limited experience with it, when a friend used his account to stream movies to the Wii that another friend had brought, and I don't recall any ads unskippable or otherwise.
Dude! SuperDuperDraco is a looooong way off. Duper technology isn't even out of university research labs yet!
You also need to assume the relativity principle and causality, but yeah...
There is no compelling business case for private space. It's already handled by a few corporations who deal with reality.
LOL, yeah, the existing launch companies are "dealing with reality", but the company that's going to come along and eat their lunch with significantly lower launch costs is delusional.
I doubt you'll see fewer satellites launched once launch costs go down.
And like it or not, NASA wants rockets to go to the ISS with people in them and that's just reality. They'll probably have uses for rockets like the ones SpaceX is building (manned or not) after the ISS program ends, and this is also reality.
I don't think it's SpaceX that's delusional.
Yeah it sucks how the earth warms 1000 degrees every time I drive to work. Sorry for cooking everyone! :)
*BUT*, there comes a massive performance penalty which is that the clock rate now has to be twice as fast as a RISC processor in order to achieve the same results.
That's just complete bollocks.
A modern x86 processor (meaning... since the Pentium Pro in the mid 90s) is, internally, a RISC-like core with full OoO execution and so on and so forth.
Variable instruction decode is a pain in the ass and does add latency in the front end. This isn't great, but it is nowhere near a 50% reduction in IPC. Try more like 1-2% (measured via correlated cycle-accurate performance simulator), depending on how clever you get and in any case easily made up for by a clever widget or two.
Basically predictions of RISC eating x86 for breakfast were made over 15 years ago and never came to pass. Mostly by x86 morphing so that the difference was essentially irrelevant.
Your talk about northbridges sounds woefully out of date, too. This has nothing to do with ISA, and both major x86 vendors now have integrated northbridges.
You're closer to reality when talking about power. Regardless of the small IPC penalty, those decoders burn up a lot of power. There are ways to get around this, too, and for moderate perf moderate low power x86 does just fine. At the very low end of power, though, going to something like ARM makes sense.
Are you suggesting that mass is converted into energy in a chemical reaction?
Matter isn't converted into energy, but if energy is released then so is mass (as we normally think of it, like it causes stuff to weigh more on a scale and have more inertia and so forth).
Hey look another idiot like the OP who thinks "Do the math!" means use vague qualitative statements!
Guess what, "ginormous" and "miniscule" have different meanings when talking about the scale of the earth, and the energy received by the sun. The sun dumps thousands of metric tonnes worth of energy on the earth every year. The earth masses at around 10^24 kg. 160 tonnes is in fact minuscule. It can't realistically be accounted for just by atmospheric heating, but that's not the same thing as saying it's completely unrealistic.
Idiot.
The internal heat is leftover from the pre-moon/pre-earth collision, if you believe in the big-impact theory.
Even if you don't, the gravitational binding energy of the planet Earth would cause it to have a hot core for a very long time.
Dude, your math is WAY off. How'd you go from mass to required energy without determining the specific heat of the earth?
Here, let me calculate the energy required to heat just the iron content of the earth (34.6% by mass) by 1 C: 9.278* 10^26 J, which is equivalent to 1.037 & 10^7 metric tonnes.
You are off by a LOT of decimal places. A mere 23kJ should have immediately tipped you off as not passing the smell test. That's less than 1/1000th of the energy released by burning 1 liter of gasoline!
The calculations are below in the thread. It is off by 3 orders of magnitude if you look at only atmospheric heating.
Then don't just look at only atmospheric heating.
Of course that gets more complicated... maybe our napkin engineering isn't up to the task and it would take more time -- like enough time to write a research paper -- to come up with a more credible answer.
They are not, however, assuming the entire core (or even a significant fraction of the planet below the surface) gets heated to arrive at that number.
The earth is 34.6% iron. That would mean 9.278E26 J to heat just the iron content of earth by 1 degree, which means 1.032E7 metric tonnes.
It is a fallacy that the US lost in Vietnam, although they did later "lose" Vietnam itself (there is a difference).
Right we only lost in the only way that is relevant because the entire goal of the Vietnam conflict was not to lose South Vietnam to Communism. That goal was not achieved. We lost.
We "didn't lose" in a sense that is completely irrelevant because were it not for the strategic motivation for entering the conflict -- which was a failure -- then the military "wins" never would have occurred.
So, South Vietnam was lost to US interests but the US forces were actually unbeaten in the field when they left, and had destroyed the Viet Cong (but were not permitted to destroy the North Vietnamese Army for political reasons, although it was well within US capabilities).
Of course. All we would have had to do was treat Vietnam as if it was World War II and our war machine would have rolled over the NVA.
Too bad this wasn't Word War II, and the politics surrounding it, the whole reason we were there, made things more complicated and changed the meaning of "win" to something other than simply achieving military success at any cost.
Like every conflict we've been engaged in since other than Desert Storm.
We lost Vietnam exactly because we didn't understand how to use the military in a situation where winning militarily and winning in actuality were not the same thing.
My take-away is that we're going to have to kick Global Warming into high-gear in order to counteract the much more serious (and embarrassing) Global Shrinkage!
It would take thousands to millions of years for a one degree average surface temperature change to work it's way through the entire planet.
So what? If the entire damn planet, core and everything, heated up by 1 degree the result would be a damn lot more than 160 tons of extra mass-energy!
The calculation is based simply on the estimated amount of excess solar energy retained. It has nothing to do with whether or not the energy spreads through the earth. The energy is already here, increasing the earth's mass.