We all accept that this vehicle derives it's motion through the rotation of the propeller which drives the wheels.
No, the wheels drive the propeller. The wind still pushes against the propeller, and that's what pushes the car forward, but some of the energy is taken back from the wheels to turn the propeller and blow air backwards. The result is an addition to the wind speed. Alternatively, you can think of the propeller as part of the car that is going enough slower than the car that the wind can still push on it even if the car is going faster than the wind.
I used four rubber stoppers and a six-inch metal rod. Two stoppers were #10's, and two were #5's. I pushed the #5's onto the rod first so they met in the middle of the rod with the big ends almost touching. I put the #10's on the ends of the rod with the big ends on the outside. The result was an axle with two big wheels at the ends and two smaller wheels near the middle. I set it on the table, then I slid a ruler under the small wheels and pressed upward lightly. The big wheels touch the table top, the small wheels touch the ruler. Move the ruler back and forth in the rolling direction, and presto: The contraption rolls in the direction of ruler motion, but at a faster speed.
Having aerodynamics involved makes analysis much harder, but I'm beginning to think that the described wind car might really work.
In order to get to the Senate floor for a vote, this bill has to go through the Senate comittee on Commerce, Science and Transportation. This committee is chaired by Sen. John McCain (R, Ariz), who has already shown his disregard for the will of the people by promising that his committee would kill any bill that attempted to reverse the FCC decision that relaxed the limits on numbers of broadcasting stations that single companies can own.
McCain is a confirmed toady of big business. He'll never let anything that might inconvenience his patrons become law.
...why Asscroft pushed so hard for the new "Anti-terrorist" laws. I don't think he gives a rat's ass about catching terrorists; his real objective is putting all the godless sinners behind bars.
SCO has publicly denied the validity of the only license they have to distribute the software.
If they don't accept the license, they can't distribute the software. Distributing without a license is copyright infringement.
I suspect that your success has a lot to do with the fact that you use your own product.
It's a whole different ball of wax when a tech school takes someone's money and can forget about them a nanosecond after they walk out the door.
What marketdroid would want information that doesn't identify "interesting" individuals?
A body of information that makes everybody look alike is useless.
The information that makes people stand out from the crowd really *IS* more valuable.
Most apps that install spyware usually have something in their license that says "we have the right to install whatever we want on your system". When a license says something like that I usually back away and not install it.
That isn't always an option. When I saw a Gator EULA pop up during a recent DivX codec install, I immediately clicked "NO". I got a second Gator EULA, and I clicked "NO" to that one, too. The fscking Gator crap installed anyway.
I tried uninstalling the codec, which removed the codec but left the Gator crap behind. It also left me with NO DivX codecs at all.
SCO was taking a publicity beating on several fronts:
- They got an unfavorable ruling WRT discovery on Friday
- The world discovers Boies isn't so confident of SCO's case that he's willing to take the case on contingency. Boies is billing by the hour, he just stands to get a big bonus under certain conditions.
- Baystar/RBC isn't happy about the Boies deal, so they demand and get the power to veto certain courses of action.
- SCO has to delay their earning announcement by two weeks to screw around with the numbers.
Needless to say, SCOX stock price dives, and the lo and behold, an attack on SCO's website suddenly becomes the to SCO new item and buries all the other bad news. How fortunate!
It doesn't matter. IBM has a countersuit that will remain even if SCO's case is dismissed.
After all the jerking around IBM has endured from SCO, I don't think IBM will be dropping their countersuit. I'd be surprised if IBM didn't stop until there was nothing left of SCO but a smoking crater. IBM will probably want to make an object lesson out of SCO to discourage the next fuckwad who might want to try the same stunt.
So what you're saying is that because you don't control the instruction set, it's impossible to build a C Compiler?
No, I didn't say impossible. Also, any computer that you are likely to run a C compiler on probably has an instruction set that was designed for general-purpose computing. I'll bet it's a lot harder to port a C compiler to other kinds of chips, such as digital signal processors or the GPU chips found in high-end graphics cards.
All I'm trying to say is that we didn't have any say in the design of the particle interaction laws that would comprise the instruction set of the machine that executes our molecular assembler, and that those laws may make building a true general-purpose assembler difficult or impossible.
Now, imagine that the bricks come in several hundred shapes and sizes and the mortar can be formulated to produce a wide range of strength and fexiblity.
OK, so make can make bricks and mortar that are suitable for convenient assembpluy. Now, how do you fabricate atoms having convenient properties? The last time I checked, the properties of atoms were dictated by laws of nature that we don't yet completely understand and have no clues whatsoever about how to change.
Your criticism has flaws comparable to the ones you point out in my analogy.
The first molecular assembler can be built "by hand", just like the first robots were. We've already got the capability to shove around individual atoms (remember IBM spelling out "IBM" with Xenon atoms?), so it's at least theoretically possible (as long as we only need Xenon atoms to build it at least;) ).
I don't think that first molecular assembler will be truly general-purpose, but rather will be capable of building only a limited variety of molecules. I think we're going to have to build a hell of a lot of primitive assemblers "by hand" before we have enough basic tools to tackle more complicated assemblers, and that many iterations will be needed before general assembly can be tackled (it might not be possible).
Try to make a C compiler out of C while you are at it. Oh yeah...Already done!
I think that's a flawed analogy, because the machine the C compiler needs to execute it can be built without any need for a pre-existing C compiler, and we can build that machine in a manner that ensures it will be possible for it to execute the C compiler.
We don't have such a luxury when building molecular assemblers. The "machine" we run on isn't under our control: It's the particle interaction laws nature stuck us with, and nobody has yet proved those laws admit the design of a general-purpose molecular assembler. Maybe it can be done, but I think it's going to be a long, slow process.
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That doesn't work because we have catastrophic artificial problems.
No, the wheels drive the propeller. The wind still pushes against the propeller, and that's what pushes the car forward, but some of the energy is taken back from the wheels to turn the propeller and blow air backwards. The result is an addition to the wind speed. Alternatively, you can think of the propeller as part of the car that is going enough slower than the car that the wind can still push on it even if the car is going faster than the wind.
I used four rubber stoppers and a six-inch metal rod. Two stoppers were #10's, and two were #5's. I pushed the #5's onto the rod first so they met in the middle of the rod with the big ends almost touching. I put the #10's on the ends of the rod with the big ends on the outside. The result was an axle with two big wheels at the ends and two smaller wheels near the middle. I set it on the table, then I slid a ruler under the small wheels and pressed upward lightly. The big wheels touch the table top, the small wheels touch the ruler. Move the ruler back and forth in the rolling direction, and presto: The contraption rolls in the direction of ruler motion, but at a faster speed. Having aerodynamics involved makes analysis much harder, but I'm beginning to think that the described wind car might really work.
McCain is a confirmed toady of big business. He'll never let anything that might inconvenience his patrons become law.
...why Asscroft pushed so hard for the new "Anti-terrorist" laws. I don't think he gives a rat's ass about catching terrorists; his real objective is putting all the godless sinners behind bars.
...they just show incredible ethical and moral flexibility WRT anything that increases the "bottom line".
Yeah, so that means they're one of very few companies that's stupid enough to be a suitable defendant.
SCO has publicly denied the validity of the only license they have to distribute the software.
If they don't accept the license, they can't distribute the software. Distributing without a license is copyright infringement.
The big CEO's tell the government what to do anyway, so any program that appears to put the government in charge merely conceals the truth.
I suspect that your success has a lot to do with the fact that you use your own product.
It's a whole different ball of wax when a tech school takes someone's money and can forget about them a nanosecond after they walk out the door.
How about if we liken Microsoft to a cancer? It grows continuously and destroys anything that gets in it's way.
What marketdroid would want information that doesn't identify "interesting" individuals?
A body of information that makes everybody look alike is useless.
The information that makes people stand out from the crowd really *IS* more valuable.
...Novell is asserting that SCO owes Novell 95% of all those millions of dollars in licensing fees received in the SCO extortion campaign. ...
Yeah, and Boies has a contract that says he gets 20%. That means SCO has to pay out 115% of all the "license fees" they collect.
For that matter, many Javascript-supporting browsers allow Javascript to be disabled.
Most apps that install spyware usually have something in their license that says "we have the right to install whatever we want on your system". When a license says something like that I usually back away and not install it.
That isn't always an option. When I saw a Gator EULA pop up during a recent DivX codec install, I immediately clicked "NO". I got a second Gator EULA, and I clicked "NO" to that one, too. The fscking Gator crap installed anyway. I tried uninstalling the codec, which removed the codec but left the Gator crap behind. It also left me with NO DivX codecs at all.
Thankfully, I have good backups.
SCO was taking a publicity beating on several fronts:
- They got an unfavorable ruling WRT discovery on Friday
- The world discovers Boies isn't so confident of SCO's case that he's willing to take the case on contingency. Boies is billing by the hour, he just stands to get a big bonus under certain conditions.
- Baystar/RBC isn't happy about the Boies deal, so they demand and get the power to veto certain courses of action.
- SCO has to delay their earning announcement by two weeks to screw around with the numbers.
Needless to say, SCOX stock price dives, and the lo and behold, an attack on SCO's website suddenly becomes the to SCO new item and buries all the other bad news. How fortunate!
Well, that is what SCO was apparently trying to do. The judge just put an stop to it.
So where's the hypocrisy?
It doesn't matter. IBM has a countersuit that will remain even if SCO's case is dismissed.
After all the jerking around IBM has endured from SCO, I don't think IBM will be dropping their countersuit.
I'd be surprised if IBM didn't stop until there was nothing left of SCO but a smoking crater.
IBM will probably want to make an object lesson out of SCO to discourage the next fuckwad who might want to try the same stunt.
Too late to bet: The magistrate judge mopped the floor with SCO, and now it really IS "put up or shut up".
The good stuff is from IBM:
http://sco.tuxrocks.com/Docs/IBM/Doc-86.pdf
It's "put up or shut up" time for SCO. Read and enjoy.
So what you're saying is that because you don't control the instruction set, it's impossible to build a C Compiler?
No, I didn't say impossible. Also, any computer that you are likely to run a C compiler on probably has an instruction set that was designed for general-purpose computing. I'll bet it's a lot harder to port a C compiler to other kinds of chips, such as digital signal processors or the GPU chips found in high-end graphics cards.
All I'm trying to say is that we didn't have any say in the design of the particle interaction laws that would comprise the instruction set of the machine that executes our molecular assembler, and that those laws may make building a true general-purpose assembler difficult or impossible.
Now, imagine that the bricks come in several hundred shapes and sizes and the mortar can be formulated to produce a wide range of strength and fexiblity.
OK, so make can make bricks and mortar that are suitable for convenient assembpluy. Now, how do you fabricate atoms having convenient properties? The last time I checked, the properties of atoms were dictated by laws of nature that we don't yet completely understand and have no clues whatsoever about how to change.
Your criticism has flaws comparable to the ones you point out in my analogy.
The first molecular assembler can be built "by hand", just like the first robots were. We've already got the capability to shove around individual atoms (remember IBM spelling out "IBM" with Xenon atoms?), so it's at least theoretically possible (as long as we only need Xenon atoms to build it at least ;) ).
I don't think that first molecular assembler will be truly general-purpose, but rather will be capable of building only a limited variety of molecules. I think we're going to have to build a hell of a lot of primitive assemblers "by hand" before we have enough basic tools to tackle more complicated assemblers, and that many iterations will be needed before general assembly can be tackled (it might not be possible).
I didn't say "impossible". I said "Much more difficult".
Try to make a C compiler out of C while you are at it. Oh yeah...Already done!
I think that's a flawed analogy, because the machine the C compiler needs to execute it can be built without any need for a pre-existing C compiler, and we can build that machine in a manner that ensures it will be possible for it to execute the C compiler.
We don't have such a luxury when building molecular assemblers. The "machine" we run on isn't under our control: It's the particle interaction laws nature stuck us with, and nobody has yet proved those laws admit the design of a general-purpose molecular assembler. Maybe it can be done, but I think it's going to be a long, slow process.