I get a lot of spam, so I've been working on a hardware accelleration card for/dev/null.
Many years ago, I used to go to DEC Users Group meetings. In the evenings, we'd have "sessions" where the operating system developers would come around and tell war stories. I remember one time that one of the RSX-11 (one of the PDP-11 operating systems) developers was telling us that writes to the Null device (NUL:) was found to be considerable slower than writes to real hardware. Therefore, they had begun development of a null hardware device to be plugged into the system. It was to be called the NUL-11 board, and they had developed quite a bit of specification material for it, unfortunately lost (this was in the early '80s). Very fun stuff.
Rage against the machine all you want, but when your boss says you will have shared contacts and calendars and your clients will run Windows; find me a solution that comes within miles of the ease of Outlook and Exchange and I'll give you a cookie.
Groupwise. (And no, it doesn't need to run on a Novell server - the daemons run very nicely on NT. And the clients use TCP/IP these days. And, no more Outlook viruses.)
Having them wait for the return capsule is a bit dramatic, but really not necessary.
The point would be there will be no return. Why waste a space shot on setting up a return trip when you could use it to better supply the pioneers? It would be defined as a one-way trip from the get-go, and the people making the voyage would know that they would die on the moon - heros, but dead. People would be lining up based on the glory factor alone.
Same thing with all the mining, O2, food, water, etc.
Since we wouldn't know exactly what the pioneers would need, you could only send up generalized equipment ahead of time. Mining / o2 extration would be the hardest thing to determine without somebody actually there to do assays. You'd want to have various equipment ready, but only launch the stuff that you'd actually need (no sense launching equipment to handle water ice if there isn't any, for example).
I'd plan things a whole lot different if I didn't have to worry about bringing people back, at least not right away.
It might be a whole lot easier to accomplish getting somebody to the moon to live if you didn't have to worry about getting them back. I'm willing to believe that the Chinese would send people up to the moon with supplies to attempt to set up a moon base, and keep sending them more stuff, but not worry about the return trip, at least not right away. Send 3 guys up with O2, food, water, and equipment to process lunar dust and rock to extract O2. Use the weight budget that would have been used for a return trip for more survival supplies. Send up resupply rockets. Once the people on the moon have had a chance to experiment on the lunar dust and get a better idea of what would work (perhaps dying in the process), send more people with better equipment. Keep sending people. Don't worry - those who died on the moon did so in the firm belief that they were paving the way for those who followed. They'd be heros on the ground.
The dynamics are way different if you are willing to accept casulties.
As others have mentioned above, one problem with the idea of China establishing a moon-base is that they could use the positional advantage that gives them to cheaply and easily blow up (or threaten to do so) pretty much any nation on earth from a launch base which would be hard to take out with a counter-attack.
The only problem with China attacking from the moon is that it's pretty hard to pull off a sneak attack - the incoming rocks will be quite visible to radar and will take a couple of days to arrive. That means that conventional attacks against Chinese targets would be a major component of retailiation.
It would turn into an ugly war, for sure.
Re:China is mining the moon for
on
China Plans Moonbase
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· Score: 3, Informative
the creation od nuclear silos. not only that but they will put a powerfull rciever up there and monitor communications.
If you're on the moon, you don't need nuclear weapons. As for communications, the signal loss is so dramatic, especially for signals that aren't explicitly pointed at the moon, that you'd be wasting your time.
Since 80% of the effort of going to the moon is actually used in getting off the earth's surface, you'd be better off with earth-based satellites. For some information (of unknown quality) on this topic, check the Federation of American Scientists site.
Getting cancelled from AOL
on
Disconnecting
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· Score: 5, Funny
It's actually pretty easy to get AOL to cancel your account. All you have to do is to go into one of their chat rooms and start typing profanity. Works even better if it's a kid's room and you start propositioning them. Your account will last about 5 minutes.
You pay the 60$ for your cable provider, NOT for the broadcasting companies. They get exactly 0.00$ from these 60$.
Wrong. Cable-only channel providers do get money per head from the cable company. The amount varies (I heard somewhere that the Weather Channel gets something like 20 cents per connected household per month; others are higher).
If it wasn't there I would forget to look at the channel indicator and might think I was watching CBS.
Actually, with Tivo it's nearly that way now. I program the shows I want. I don't care what channel or time they are on. Later, I come back to the machine and see what it's recorded for me and I watch it. Channel? What channel? (Prime example: in response to the Max Headroom article from earlier this week, I ran to my Tivo and programmed Title: "Max Headroom", Keep: Until I delete. Tech TV? WTF? Who cares?
No, we're talking about Devine here - one of the dot.com poster children. They are dying, and this is an attempt to stave off shutting down for another quarter.
You bet. The one in Sprindale Ohio is 30 minutes from my house. I'll wait a couple of days for the nerd contingent to dissapate a bit, and then we're there.
(Given that we are reaching the point where we have more memory and CPU power in computers than we know what to do with, I would be highly interested in seeing more OS development that allows for (security) meta-data to be associated with areas of memory as far as the permissions/state of that memory goes.
The Ogg reply says that the only two standards bodies they know about are IETF and W3C. Well, what about IEEE? What about SMPTE? Those are technical bodies that deal with these kinds of standards all the time.
>but isn't it always necessary to prove that a crime has been committed before you can get a conviction ?
Sure. The point of the (now overturned law) was to turn the act of creating child porn, even simulated, into a crime. Since regular child porn is already illegal, the idea here was to extend it. (For example, photoshopping a child's head onto the picture of a naked grownup would be illegal even though no child was harmed.)
AM and FM have always been free after price of equipment (a radio).
Not even close. You pay for your "free" radio by being subjected to advertising. Same for TV. The customers of a radio station and a TV station are the advertisers. You are the product that the station delivers to its customers. The music and TV shows are simply part of the overhead needed by the station to create it's product for delivery to its customers.
After all, evolution is the transition from one species to another.
Not quite. Bacteria developing drug resistance is indeed evolution, since evolution is strictly defined as changes in alleles (genes) in a population over time. Enough evolution over time can result in a new species - this is called (no suprprise here) speciation, which has also been observed in the lab and in the wild. But evolution is not directly equal to speciation.
In the end, this report is plagued with the same problems that Stanley Miller faced in 1955, sorry kids, deep space (or almost every other non-biological natural chemical synthesis) doesn't care about symmetry.
Did you read the link about chirality? They address this very issue off the "more questions" page. Here is the link.
As was brought to my attention long ago on Slashdot, there have never been any observed beneficial random mutations.
And whoever said that then is as wrong as you repeating it now. Plenty of beneficial mutations have been observed. Simple example: a bacteria evolving resistance to a drug is certainly beneficial to the bacteria.
More complex example: there's a cluster of people in rural Italy that have developed a gene that gives them dramatically lower cholesterol levels, thus improving their health. Analysis of genological records show that this cluster are all descended from one person, born about 150 years ago. That person evidently got what can only be considered a beneficial mutation from one of this parents.
Slashdot Mirror
The order tracking info was put into a mass storage system built from these very devices.
I have a picture somewhere of a Flame-emitting Diode (an LED stuck into the business end of a candle and set alight).
Many years ago, I used to go to DEC Users Group meetings. In the evenings, we'd have "sessions" where the operating system developers would come around and tell war stories. I remember one time that one of the RSX-11 (one of the PDP-11 operating systems) developers was telling us that writes to the Null device (NUL:) was found to be considerable slower than writes to real hardware. Therefore, they had begun development of a null hardware device to be plugged into the system. It was to be called the NUL-11 board, and they had developed quite a bit of specification material for it, unfortunately lost (this was in the early '80s). Very fun stuff.
Groupwise. (And no, it doesn't need to run on a Novell server - the daemons run very nicely on NT. And the clients use TCP/IP these days. And, no more Outlook viruses.)
The point would be there will be no return. Why waste a space shot on setting up a return trip when you could use it to better supply the pioneers? It would be defined as a one-way trip from the get-go, and the people making the voyage would know that they would die on the moon - heros, but dead. People would be lining up based on the glory factor alone.
Same thing with all the mining, O2, food, water, etc.
Since we wouldn't know exactly what the pioneers would need, you could only send up generalized equipment ahead of time. Mining / o2 extration would be the hardest thing to determine without somebody actually there to do assays. You'd want to have various equipment ready, but only launch the stuff that you'd actually need (no sense launching equipment to handle water ice if there isn't any, for example).
I'd plan things a whole lot different if I didn't have to worry about bringing people back, at least not right away.
It might be a whole lot easier to accomplish getting somebody to the moon to live if you didn't have to worry about getting them back. I'm willing to believe that the Chinese would send people up to the moon with supplies to attempt to set up a moon base, and keep sending them more stuff, but not worry about the return trip, at least not right away. Send 3 guys up with O2, food, water, and equipment to process lunar dust and rock to extract O2. Use the weight budget that would have been used for a return trip for more survival supplies. Send up resupply rockets. Once the people on the moon have had a chance to experiment on the lunar dust and get a better idea of what would work (perhaps dying in the process), send more people with better equipment. Keep sending people. Don't worry - those who died on the moon did so in the firm belief that they were paving the way for those who followed. They'd be heros on the ground.
The dynamics are way different if you are willing to accept casulties.
The only problem with China attacking from the moon is that it's pretty hard to pull off a sneak attack - the incoming rocks will be quite visible to radar and will take a couple of days to arrive. That means that conventional attacks against Chinese targets would be a major component of retailiation.
It would turn into an ugly war, for sure.
If you're on the moon, you don't need nuclear weapons. As for communications, the signal loss is so dramatic, especially for signals that aren't explicitly pointed at the moon, that you'd be wasting your time.
Since 80% of the effort of going to the moon is actually used in getting off the earth's surface, you'd be better off with earth-based satellites. For some information (of unknown quality) on this topic, check the Federation of American Scientists site.
It's actually pretty easy to get AOL to cancel your account. All you have to do is to go into one of their chat rooms and start typing profanity. Works even better if it's a kid's room and you start propositioning them. Your account will last about 5 minutes.
Wrong. Cable-only channel providers do get money per head from the cable company. The amount varies (I heard somewhere that the Weather Channel gets something like 20 cents per connected household per month; others are higher).
Actually, with Tivo it's nearly that way now. I program the shows I want. I don't care what channel or time they are on. Later, I come back to the machine and see what it's recorded for me and I watch it. Channel? What channel? (Prime example: in response to the Max Headroom article from earlier this week, I ran to my Tivo and programmed Title: "Max Headroom", Keep: Until I delete. Tech TV? WTF? Who cares?
No, we're talking about Devine here - one of the dot.com poster children. They are dying, and this is an attempt to stave off shutting down for another quarter.
You bet. The one in Sprindale Ohio is 30 minutes from my house. I'll wait a couple of days for the nerd contingent to dissapate a bit, and then we're there.
Oh, you mean like IBM's AS/400 operating system?
Did you hear the story that Furbies were banned from NSA headquarters because they might "learn" secrets?
The Ogg reply says that the only two standards bodies they know about are IETF and W3C. Well, what about IEEE? What about SMPTE? Those are technical bodies that deal with these kinds of standards all the time.
Moderation: +1 Insightful
crime has been committed before you can get a conviction ?
Sure. The point of the (now overturned law) was to turn the act of creating child porn, even simulated, into a crime. Since regular child porn is already illegal, the idea here was to extend it. (For example, photoshopping a child's head onto the picture of a naked grownup would be illegal even though no child was harmed.)
Same thing is happening with UltimateTV. Big initial push, but just try to find mention of it in the advertising marketplace now.
Not even close. You pay for your "free" radio by being subjected to advertising. Same for TV. The customers of a radio station and a TV station are the advertisers. You are the product that the station delivers to its customers. The music and TV shows are simply part of the overhead needed by the station to create it's product for delivery to its customers.
That was George Carlin.
Not quite. Bacteria developing drug resistance is indeed evolution, since evolution is strictly defined as changes in alleles (genes) in a population over time. Enough evolution over time can result in a new species - this is called (no suprprise here) speciation, which has also been observed in the lab and in the wild. But evolution is not directly equal to speciation.
Correction: it wasn't 150 years ago, it was 220 years ago. His name was Giovanni Pomaroli. A popularized account of the research may be found here.
Did you read the link about chirality? They address this very issue off the "more questions" page. Here is the link.
And whoever said that then is as wrong as you repeating it now. Plenty of beneficial mutations have been observed. Simple example: a bacteria evolving resistance to a drug is certainly beneficial to the bacteria.
More complex example: there's a cluster of people in rural Italy that have developed a gene that gives them dramatically lower cholesterol levels, thus improving their health. Analysis of genological records show that this cluster are all descended from one person, born about 150 years ago. That person evidently got what can only be considered a beneficial mutation from one of this parents.