I don't care what spacing you feel is best, do whatever you think is most legible or efficient or whatever, so long as you don't use real tabs. Because using real tabs is basically like taking a giant runny shit all over your own preference, and guaranteeing that your code looks like unreadable ass to many other people.
Spaces, not tabs. As long as we can agree on that, I'm happy with whatever.
Ah, I see. The argument as I heard it made a whole lot of sense based on the nature of waves... I just need to remind myself that in the modern conception that electrons and such are neither classical waves nor classical particles, but things that have some properties of both and other properties that aren't like either.
Government did not make the internet what it is today; private industry did. Government wanted a WAN design, granted, but yeesh. 'government-created information network' is definitely not just a stretch, it's inaccurate. Government opening the door to private industry does not equate to government creation, and it certainly doesn't show initial interference to back up your somewhat rude point (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet#History)
They created the technology, deployed the first real networks, and when they opened it up to private enterprise in 1988, many of them received government subsidies for the development of their networks, not to mention right of way and other dispensation. The ones that already existed only became part of the Internet because the Government had first created it; before that the private networks were walled gardens. Yes private enterprise developed the internet from that to what it is today, but to say it was government created is completely 100% accurate, and to say it exists in its current form only because of government "interference" is also 100% accurate.
If you don't like the term "government created" to describe the Internet as it exists today, fine, in that context I misspoke. You can't deny that the government did "interfere" with private enterprise in a way that guided them towards creating what does exist, directly contradicting the OP's point, which is my point.
The internet would be born no matter who designed it. [snip] And who knows, had private enterprise designed the internet from the start, it could have more elegant solutions and such.
Ah, the youthful imagination of how things might have been, unhindered by knowledge of how they were, knows no bounds. And in that imagination, the Internet comes to be in its current form regardless, only better!
But in reality, we already know what private enterprise would have created, because they did create it, or rather them. And they were called Prodigy, AOL, CompuServe, MSN, and others. Of course they were largely piggy-backing off the government-created telephone network, but let's skip that for now.
And you're right, they had some very elegant solutions. For example, they dispensed immediately with the idea that every host should be able to act as both client and server, and that it should be possible to host data outside of on the singular corporation's servers and without their approval. Why it would be so much more efficient if we couldn't waste our time on Slashdot because it violated the AOL community standards.
And talk about elegance -- how about having multiple, mutually exclusive networks! This whole "one global network" thing is totally inelegant. Oh sure there was some consolidation due to buyouts and mergers, but we'd still be waiting for that process to conclude. It's only because of the existence of the Internet, and it's obvious superiority to anything private industry had provided on its own, that forced AOL, MSN, and the other few remaining private networks to first provide Internet access, and then ultimately become simply ISPs with only minor portal websites to remind you of what had been. Though even as this was happening, Bill Gates was saying the Internet was just a passing fad and he was betting everyone would come back to the safe walled garden of MSN soon -- oh yeah, he was just about to create something even better than the Internet. Uh-huh.
Had it not been for the Internet, we wouldn't be having this conversation because you'd be on MSN and I'd be on AOL.
We know what private industry would have done if there was no government interference, if you had your way. And it would have sucked ass.
Thanks for letting me know that government interference always fucks things up on the government-created information network. It would be so much better if I was unable to hear your insightful commentary. The internet sure has fucked up our economy.
the traffic court was using Google Maps' Satellite View in order to count the number of mailboxes along the road to determine the number of houses on the road
Wouldn't it make more sense and be a lot easier to count... I don't know... houses to determine the number of houses? When I look at my neighborhood in satellite view, sure some of the houses are half covered by trees, but they're still way easier to see than mailboxes.
If you really wanted to polish your geek cred, you'd know that transparent aluminum exists
Transparent to extreme ultraviolet is not what Scotty meant by "transparent".
Still it's an awesome material science achievement. I just think "transparent aluminum" should be reserved for a material we can use as a space ship view port. Not a thing we could use as a space ship get-skin-cancer-without-realizing-it port.;)
In the case of Iraq he was saying don't invade....
Ha! I knew that ideas like "Let's deal reasonably with the various factions instead of dividing the universe into U.S. Allies and Teh Terrorists" wern't welcome in Rumsfeld's DoD, but if his view was that the whole thing was a bad idea then no wonder it took a change of SecDef before he was allowed to contribute.:P
It's not ironic in the slightest for a solar-orbiting satellite to get knocked out by a coronal mass ejection. That's exactly what one would expect to happen. There's no reversal of expectations whatsoever, unless you expect that a solar observatory is somehow also a solar defense shield.
Irony is not the most straightforward and expected series of events. SOHO detects mass ejection. SOHO gets hit by it. SOHO dies.
Irony is you linking to a post that actually proves my point, but then points out what a dork I am for arguing it.:P
Impractical for personal residence deployment and use, but I'd certainly call a big solar power generation station providing energy "everyday use". Or at least, I'd like for it to be an everyday use. Much like efficient windmills are much too large for my backyard, yet provide me with clean energy everyday.
Iraq and Afghanistan are different situations. In Afghanistan, there is actual territory being lost and won. Having extra military forces to hold our position against the Taleban advances -- yes, actual advances by the enemy -- is very useful. In Iraq, the whole country is "ours" and the enemy lives there and attacks entirely from within. There, extra troops are mostly just extra targets for surprise attacks. There's no hard line, like nothing happening in Iraq happens in Afghanistan, but for certain there are no cases in Iraq of a definable enemy swooping in and taking a town that we had previously won.
So to me, it makes a lot more sense to be critical of the "surge" in Iraq vs the "surge" in Afghanistan. Especially considering how neglected Afghanistan had been for so many years.
However, the most important and effective -- yet least talked about -- aspect of Petraeus' Iraqi surge was the attempts to engage the insurgents in general and in particular the Sunnis, basically buying them off and convincing them that Al Qaeda in Iraq was our mutual enemy (with AQ conveniently helping us out in this regard by helping Sunnis get killed). This and other efforts actually gave them the sense that they had some role in and stake in the future of Iraq. Convincing the Sunnis to stop fighting us through non-violent means did far more to decrease the violence than the extra troops did. It was a great, the kind that could have made a real difference if deployed early on in Iraq.
With Petraeus in charge, I'm hoping that in addition to the actually-helpful-cus-it's-actually-kinda-like-a-real-war troop increases, there will also be much more behind-the-scenes dealing with Taleban factions that may come around to our side. There's been talk of this in the news, and hopefully there will be real effects.
Where the hell was Petraeus when we invaded these countries?!
The uncertainty principle originally made statements about what can be known about position and velocity. You cannot measure both position and velocity simultaneously above a certain degree of accuracy. The more accurate your measure of velocity, the less you know about position, and visa versa.
I thought the Uncertainty Principle was based on something more fundamental than our ability to measure, but on the ability to define momentum and position for a wave function. A wave with only one frequency has a perfectly defined momentum, but cannot be said to be located at any position is space. A wave function with infinitely many wavelengths can create a packet can be said to have a precise location, but then the momentum (wavelength) cannot be defined. Even if we knew these properties of the wavefunction via omniscience, circumventing the whole "measuring" thing, to the extent that one property can be precisely defined, the other can't be.
And then when you do have to actually measure, forcing the wave function to have a precise momentum means increasing uncertainty on the position, and vice versa.
This technique sounds like an interesting way to try to get around it, but my question is: When measuring an entangled particle, you destroy the entanglement. And then each particle still has the property that if you confine its momentum its position becomes less well defined and vice versa, and those properties may no longer reflect the original state. Maybe this would let them put limits on the original state, such that they can infer the original properties with more precision than the Uncertainty Principle would allow, but I'm betting it still affects their two measurements and thus their ultimate precision -- maybe something like (h/2)^2 ?
While it's true that IceCube is designed to be a neutrino telescope, the observations here involve more common and easier to detect cosmic rays (e.g. gamma rays), coming from the southern half of the sky.
See, when IceCube is looking for neutrinos, they look for signals coming from beneath the northern part of the sky. They are essentially using the entire planet earth as a filter for cosmic rays since they can't pass through that much solid material, while neutrinos can with ease. Neutrinos don't interact electromagnetically at all, so to them "solid" matter is mostly empty space. Which includes the detector itself, which is why it's so important to filter out sources of noise.
They can tell what direction something is coming from (see the map), so if it came from the sky, it's probably not a neutrino but some other cosmic ray. And it looks like they were looking at all the data they would be subtracting out from their data sets when looking for neutrinos, and found something interesting about the distribution.
But as the article itself says, our magnetic field could in fact be the cause of this observed feature, since the rays in question are electromagnetic in nature. But I like the supernova theory, because it involves gigantic explosions.:)
They sacrificed a ton of fuel they could have put into a bigger rocket to get a sturdier rover there, and still had it today to do another year of science.
Assuming you meant "If they sacrificed a ton of fuel",
Pack half a dozen rockets with all the equipment we can think of, and get it on-site. Let the rover go around and assemble the gear onto itself when it gets there.
That's a great idea -- for the future. In fact it's in the future if NASA's technology development plans don't get too damaged by Congress demanding a shuttle successor. Robotic assembly from separately launched components (specifically targeting automated resource harvesters/processors, but obviously this could include exploration craft) is one of the technology developments supposed to occur in the next 10 years.
See, NASA engineers understand that you can't just blow up the size of what your launching, and it makes more sense to launch and land smaller components for a lot of the reasons, including the difficulty of landing larger components without them being damaged. It's nice to see you acknowledging that reality at least somewhat.
Anyway, point is -- that technology is in development. When Spirit and Opportunity were launched neither the rocket-sky-hook nor robotic-self-assembly techniques existed. Airbags were the only known method to work. So your dream rover would either still be in development, or it'd be a fucking crater on the Martian surface. Either way, what we got, when we got it, was better.
But your example of survivability of the touchdown is begging the question. It can't survive the touchdown because they didn't make it strong enough. It's one of the reasons HMMV's are as strong as they are. You can dump them out of aircraft on a pallet.
Um, the MSL can (in theory, the new mechanism is unproven) survive touchdown. If they made it significantly heavier, it wouldn't be able to because mass scales faster than strength. If you meant the airbag landing, that's just ludicrous, it can't survive that because its mass is too high for airbags to protect it, and heavier would just make that even more impossible. It'd just be crashing into the planet.
You can't drop a HMMWV very far. A lighter vehicle of equal material strength would actually be able to survive a farther drop. That's basic physics, not begging the question. Try to drop a HMMWV in an airbag-protected lander onto Mars and it'd be scrap. While Spirit and Opportunity were fine because they're so much lighter. Get it?
The rocket thing is a good idea, except that the mass of rocket you need goes up super-linearly with the mass of payload you're trying to decelerate.
Yes, another reason why they can't afford to increase the mass of the rover as much as you'd like. Those much bigger (yet more precise to keep landing velocity down) rockets would feed right back into the initial launch equation.
Your statement about where I work is tautological. That's two classical fallacies you've resorted to in attempting to question my reasoning.
Look, it wasn't intended as an insult, I'm sure you're good at your job. But if keeping mass down isn't a primary consideration, then no your job is not closely related to what NASA is doing. Mass is a primary consideration of NASA, it's not apparently on your radar, ergo your jobs are not closely related.
Claiming logical fallacies because you didn't follow the logic means nothing.
One of the Mars landers crapped out this year because too much frost (albeit a layer of dry ice a couple of feet thick) snapped its solar panels. Prissy design is passe.
Oh yeah, and denigrating the previous rover designs because one of them finally crapped out is just silly. You think they could have designed it to withstand a couple feet of ice accumulation and not had to sacrifice a ton of other things? If so, you're wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't care what spacing you feel is best, do whatever you think is most legible or efficient or whatever, so long as you don't use real tabs. Because using real tabs is basically like taking a giant runny shit all over your own preference, and guaranteeing that your code looks like unreadable ass to many other people.
Spaces, not tabs. As long as we can agree on that, I'm happy with whatever.
Ah, the ol' "trick the new guy into drinking from the Grail" bit. "It'll make you immortal! We've all done it! *snicker*"
The Masons haven't been the same since they cracked down on Freshman hazing. :(
That's not very Christianly of you. What ever happened to "turn the other hemisphere"?
Proper enunciation, of course, being one of the problems earlier in the show -- "Up and at them!"
Between you and me there is at least one but probably several backbones deployed by a University and payed for by state and federal government funds.
So yes, we're talking over a government-created information network.
Ah, I see. The argument as I heard it made a whole lot of sense based on the nature of waves... I just need to remind myself that in the modern conception that electrons and such are neither classical waves nor classical particles, but things that have some properties of both and other properties that aren't like either.
Government did not make the internet what it is today; private industry did. Government wanted a WAN design, granted, but yeesh. 'government-created information network' is definitely not just a stretch, it's inaccurate. Government opening the door to private industry does not equate to government creation, and it certainly doesn't show initial interference to back up your somewhat rude point (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet#History)
They created the technology, deployed the first real networks, and when they opened it up to private enterprise in 1988, many of them received government subsidies for the development of their networks, not to mention right of way and other dispensation. The ones that already existed only became part of the Internet because the Government had first created it; before that the private networks were walled gardens. Yes private enterprise developed the internet from that to what it is today, but to say it was government created is completely 100% accurate, and to say it exists in its current form only because of government "interference" is also 100% accurate.
If you don't like the term "government created" to describe the Internet as it exists today, fine, in that context I misspoke. You can't deny that the government did "interfere" with private enterprise in a way that guided them towards creating what does exist, directly contradicting the OP's point, which is my point.
The internet would be born no matter who designed it. [snip] And who knows, had private enterprise designed the internet from the start, it could have more elegant solutions and such.
Ah, the youthful imagination of how things might have been, unhindered by knowledge of how they were, knows no bounds. And in that imagination, the Internet comes to be in its current form regardless, only better!
But in reality, we already know what private enterprise would have created, because they did create it, or rather them. And they were called Prodigy, AOL, CompuServe, MSN, and others. Of course they were largely piggy-backing off the government-created telephone network, but let's skip that for now.
And you're right, they had some very elegant solutions. For example, they dispensed immediately with the idea that every host should be able to act as both client and server, and that it should be possible to host data outside of on the singular corporation's servers and without their approval. Why it would be so much more efficient if we couldn't waste our time on Slashdot because it violated the AOL community standards.
And talk about elegance -- how about having multiple, mutually exclusive networks! This whole "one global network" thing is totally inelegant. Oh sure there was some consolidation due to buyouts and mergers, but we'd still be waiting for that process to conclude. It's only because of the existence of the Internet, and it's obvious superiority to anything private industry had provided on its own, that forced AOL, MSN, and the other few remaining private networks to first provide Internet access, and then ultimately become simply ISPs with only minor portal websites to remind you of what had been. Though even as this was happening, Bill Gates was saying the Internet was just a passing fad and he was betting everyone would come back to the safe walled garden of MSN soon -- oh yeah, he was just about to create something even better than the Internet. Uh-huh.
Had it not been for the Internet, we wouldn't be having this conversation because you'd be on MSN and I'd be on AOL.
We know what private industry would have done if there was no government interference, if you had your way. And it would have sucked ass.
Thanks for letting me know that government interference always fucks things up on the government-created information network. It would be so much better if I was unable to hear your insightful commentary. The internet sure has fucked up our economy.
And to think I'm talking to the inventor of the compass right here on /.!
the traffic court was using Google Maps' Satellite View in order to count the number of mailboxes along the road to determine the number of houses on the road
Wouldn't it make more sense and be a lot easier to count... I don't know... houses to determine the number of houses? When I look at my neighborhood in satellite view, sure some of the houses are half covered by trees, but they're still way easier to see than mailboxes.
If you really wanted to polish your geek cred, you'd know that transparent aluminum exists
Transparent to extreme ultraviolet is not what Scotty meant by "transparent".
Still it's an awesome material science achievement. I just think "transparent aluminum" should be reserved for a material we can use as a space ship view port. Not a thing we could use as a space ship get-skin-cancer-without-realizing-it port. ;)
Actually, you need to hit Preview first.
I don't, and I didn't realize anyone else did either.
In the case of Iraq he was saying don't invade....
Ha! I knew that ideas like "Let's deal reasonably with the various factions instead of dividing the universe into U.S. Allies and Teh Terrorists" wern't welcome in Rumsfeld's DoD, but if his view was that the whole thing was a bad idea then no wonder it took a change of SecDef before he was allowed to contribute. :P
Sounds like a cool book, btw.
It's not ironic in the slightest for a solar-orbiting satellite to get knocked out by a coronal mass ejection. That's exactly what one would expect to happen. There's no reversal of expectations whatsoever, unless you expect that a solar observatory is somehow also a solar defense shield.
Irony is not the most straightforward and expected series of events. SOHO detects mass ejection. SOHO gets hit by it. SOHO dies.
Irony is you linking to a post that actually proves my point, but then points out what a dork I am for arguing it. :P
It's like, how much more green could this be? and the answer is none. None more green.
Heart stopped... death... comes swiftly... Must... hit... Submit!
No, Alanis, that would just suck.
Impractical for personal residence deployment and use, but I'd certainly call a big solar power generation station providing energy "everyday use". Or at least, I'd like for it to be an everyday use. Much like efficient windmills are much too large for my backyard, yet provide me with clean energy everyday.
Iraq and Afghanistan are different situations. In Afghanistan, there is actual territory being lost and won. Having extra military forces to hold our position against the Taleban advances -- yes, actual advances by the enemy -- is very useful. In Iraq, the whole country is "ours" and the enemy lives there and attacks entirely from within. There, extra troops are mostly just extra targets for surprise attacks. There's no hard line, like nothing happening in Iraq happens in Afghanistan, but for certain there are no cases in Iraq of a definable enemy swooping in and taking a town that we had previously won.
So to me, it makes a lot more sense to be critical of the "surge" in Iraq vs the "surge" in Afghanistan. Especially considering how neglected Afghanistan had been for so many years.
However, the most important and effective -- yet least talked about -- aspect of Petraeus' Iraqi surge was the attempts to engage the insurgents in general and in particular the Sunnis, basically buying them off and convincing them that Al Qaeda in Iraq was our mutual enemy (with AQ conveniently helping us out in this regard by helping Sunnis get killed). This and other efforts actually gave them the sense that they had some role in and stake in the future of Iraq. Convincing the Sunnis to stop fighting us through non-violent means did far more to decrease the violence than the extra troops did. It was a great, the kind that could have made a real difference if deployed early on in Iraq.
With Petraeus in charge, I'm hoping that in addition to the actually-helpful-cus-it's-actually-kinda-like-a-real-war troop increases, there will also be much more behind-the-scenes dealing with Taleban factions that may come around to our side. There's been talk of this in the news, and hopefully there will be real effects.
Where the hell was Petraeus when we invaded these countries?!
The uncertainty principle originally made statements about what can be known about position and velocity. You cannot measure both position and velocity simultaneously above a certain degree of accuracy. The more accurate your measure of velocity, the less you know about position, and visa versa.
I thought the Uncertainty Principle was based on something more fundamental than our ability to measure, but on the ability to define momentum and position for a wave function. A wave with only one frequency has a perfectly defined momentum, but cannot be said to be located at any position is space. A wave function with infinitely many wavelengths can create a packet can be said to have a precise location, but then the momentum (wavelength) cannot be defined. Even if we knew these properties of the wavefunction via omniscience, circumventing the whole "measuring" thing, to the extent that one property can be precisely defined, the other can't be.
And then when you do have to actually measure, forcing the wave function to have a precise momentum means increasing uncertainty on the position, and vice versa.
This technique sounds like an interesting way to try to get around it, but my question is: When measuring an entangled particle, you destroy the entanglement. And then each particle still has the property that if you confine its momentum its position becomes less well defined and vice versa, and those properties may no longer reflect the original state. Maybe this would let them put limits on the original state, such that they can infer the original properties with more precision than the Uncertainty Principle would allow, but I'm betting it still affects their two measurements and thus their ultimate precision -- maybe something like (h/2)^2 ?
While it's true that IceCube is designed to be a neutrino telescope, the observations here involve more common and easier to detect cosmic rays (e.g. gamma rays), coming from the southern half of the sky.
See, when IceCube is looking for neutrinos, they look for signals coming from beneath the northern part of the sky. They are essentially using the entire planet earth as a filter for cosmic rays since they can't pass through that much solid material, while neutrinos can with ease. Neutrinos don't interact electromagnetically at all, so to them "solid" matter is mostly empty space. Which includes the detector itself, which is why it's so important to filter out sources of noise.
They can tell what direction something is coming from (see the map), so if it came from the sky, it's probably not a neutrino but some other cosmic ray. And it looks like they were looking at all the data they would be subtracting out from their data sets when looking for neutrinos, and found something interesting about the distribution.
But as the article itself says, our magnetic field could in fact be the cause of this observed feature, since the rays in question are electromagnetic in nature. But I like the supernova theory, because it involves gigantic explosions. :)
They sacrificed a ton of fuel they could have put into a bigger rocket to get a sturdier rover there, and still had it today to do another year of science.
Assuming you meant "If they sacrificed a ton of fuel",
Pack half a dozen rockets with all the equipment we can think of, and get it on-site. Let the rover go around and assemble the gear onto itself when it gets there.
That's a great idea -- for the future. In fact it's in the future if NASA's technology development plans don't get too damaged by Congress demanding a shuttle successor. Robotic assembly from separately launched components (specifically targeting automated resource harvesters/processors, but obviously this could include exploration craft) is one of the technology developments supposed to occur in the next 10 years.
See, NASA engineers understand that you can't just blow up the size of what your launching, and it makes more sense to launch and land smaller components for a lot of the reasons, including the difficulty of landing larger components without them being damaged. It's nice to see you acknowledging that reality at least somewhat.
Anyway, point is -- that technology is in development. When Spirit and Opportunity were launched neither the rocket-sky-hook nor robotic-self-assembly techniques existed. Airbags were the only known method to work. So your dream rover would either still be in development, or it'd be a fucking crater on the Martian surface. Either way, what we got, when we got it, was better.
But your example of survivability of the touchdown is begging the question. It can't survive the touchdown because they didn't make it strong enough. It's one of the reasons HMMV's are as strong as they are. You can dump them out of aircraft on a pallet.
Um, the MSL can (in theory, the new mechanism is unproven) survive touchdown. If they made it significantly heavier, it wouldn't be able to because mass scales faster than strength. If you meant the airbag landing, that's just ludicrous, it can't survive that because its mass is too high for airbags to protect it, and heavier would just make that even more impossible. It'd just be crashing into the planet.
You can't drop a HMMWV very far. A lighter vehicle of equal material strength would actually be able to survive a farther drop. That's basic physics, not begging the question. Try to drop a HMMWV in an airbag-protected lander onto Mars and it'd be scrap. While Spirit and Opportunity were fine because they're so much lighter. Get it?
The rocket thing is a good idea, except that the mass of rocket you need goes up super-linearly with the mass of payload you're trying to decelerate.
Yes, another reason why they can't afford to increase the mass of the rover as much as you'd like. Those much bigger (yet more precise to keep landing velocity down) rockets would feed right back into the initial launch equation.
Your statement about where I work is tautological. That's two classical fallacies you've resorted to in attempting to question my reasoning.
Look, it wasn't intended as an insult, I'm sure you're good at your job. But if keeping mass down isn't a primary consideration, then no your job is not closely related to what NASA is doing. Mass is a primary consideration of NASA, it's not apparently on your radar, ergo your jobs are not closely related.
Claiming logical fallacies because you didn't follow the logic means nothing.
One of the Mars landers crapped out this year because too much frost (albeit a layer of dry ice a couple of feet thick) snapped its solar panels. Prissy design is passe.
Oh yeah, and denigrating the previous rover designs because one of them finally crapped out is just silly. You think they could have designed it to withstand a couple feet of ice accumulation and not had to sacrifice a ton of other things? If so, you're wrong.