Along these lines, make the program available in an App Store. This makes it easier for paying customers. It's tiring when I want to buy a program to have to do some background research on payment processors to see if a developer chose one that is trustworthy. But Apple already has my credit info, buying is easy and safe.
But do graphics developers, of the sort who would be interested in a productivity tool, use the iPad as a development platform?
I say we drop all speed limits to 5mph everywhere, and limit passenger vehicles to 3 horsepower rubber cars. Traffic fatalities would plummet!
Of course, you'd have to exclude "starving to death on the way home" from the actual statistics. Better exclude road-rage shootings as well, come to think of it...
Their situation is unstable and the government's control is precarious. The population's desperation makes them unpredictable. Therefore they are constantly focused on actively pre-empting revolution, and that means being constantly focused on short-term goals. Provocative rhetoric might start an unwinnable war a year from now but keeps the civilian population from thinking for another day.
I believe you've nailed it. The last resort of a failing dictatorship is to divert public interest into a convenient war. That works for governments of all sizes.
Let's just hope it remains in the arena of egregious sabre-rattling, and nothing comes of it. Moving a few game pieces around is ok, as long as we don't see any rocket exhaust.
Even a solid rock of extinction size would do less damage if you break it up into more than one piece, and in doing so deflect significant chunks of it such that they would not even hit the earth. 2/3rds of the remaining pieces would land in the oceans as widely dispersed smaller chunks.
Mmm... no, don't think so. You've got to deal with the atmosphere heating up by that amount of rock dropping through it, big or small. If anything, the surface to volume ratio would mean we'd simply fry the atmosphere directly, rather than indirectly via the shock wave of impact. Kinetic energy is kinetic energy. We can be killed off by an amount of gravel equivalent to the full-sized rock.
Even though this works in theory, the asteroid is going to be many orders of magnitude more massive than the rocket in order to cause an extinction event, so this idea is basically like trying to get a flea to pull an elephant by tugging at its tail.
Start early. It's worth a lot of delta-V to simply start early enough.
Remember, any force will move it, and it will keep moving. A little force over a long, long time is more effective than an oh-god moment when it's a couple of months out.
If you are going to use this method, then the more mass in your ship the better. Unfortunately, that means a more expensive launch. If you plan ahead, you figure out a way to accumulate debris and smaller rocks at some stable orbital point so when you need mass you can launch a light ship, go to the rockyard, and gather up more mass at reduced cost.
Send lightweight thrusters out, and grab a suitable nearby rock. Use it as your mass tractor.
Actually maybe a little farther to ensure you don't hit the asteroid with any of the propellant.
In a vacuum, the gas from the propellant won't dissipate quite as much...
An additional force to think about - if you're using gas propellant, or perhaps an electrostatically accelerated ion engine, you're going to build up quite a charge throwing those ions around, aren't you? You'd have to consider that in your calcs. Might change the shape of the attraction curve between the two bodies.
Because we are currently unable to judge the stability of the object, or it's internal mass distribution just by looking at it from long range. Pushing it at any point might just lead to breaking off a small piece, or the spaceship slowly sinking into and through it. If we miss the mass center, the push will mostly be transformed into rotation.
All these problems are a non issue with gravitiational pull.
The gravitational one could be fairly efficient, if you used a co-orbiting asteroid that was small enough to maneuver with the thrusters you could provide. Grab a rocky asteroid out there for mass, pilot it over to be captured by the gravity well of The Big Nasty ("TBM"). Use the method NdGT espouses, or possibly just bind enough extra mass with TBM to change its trajectory anyhow. Would that work? Maybe a couple of hundred, or thousand micro-thrusters to grab aggregate mass via swarm coordinated navigation could add enough mass to TBM incrementally to change the angle by the requisite amount.
And the entire music industry gathers together for a wonderful holiday charity chorale, featuring their stunning new number, "We Jump The Shark Together".
Really? What killed D3 for me was the lack of any recognisable variation in repeating levels. Really, too little content. I'll stick with WoW for the time being.
By moving processing to the database, you're implicitly changing from scale-out (parallelism) to scale-up, aren't you? Unless you have a cluster with really, really fast row-level lock processing, the solution for faster DB is usually faster CPU and more memory for transaction buffers, not more computers. Larger buffers puts an additional overhead on memory-to-memory transfer (as well as more lock traffic & the delays that introduces) on a scale-out basis for databases, so the tendency is to scale up a database with fewer, but larger computers.
Innit?
(I'm using the almost archaic term "computers" here to indicate individual processing nodes. Saying "processors" has become ambiguous with the term "cores" I think.)
Check the most recent post from NYCL (New York Country Lawyer). There was a landmark judicial ruling quite recently that stated you cannot automatically connect an IP address to a person. This is hugely important.
Hmm.... sounds about right. When your huddled masses must be placated with bread and circuses, it's best to not make the ticket to the circus too expensive, or bar entry too exclusively.
Slashdot Mirror
Along these lines, make the program available in an App Store. This makes it easier for paying customers. It's tiring when I want to buy a program to have to do some background research on payment processors to see if a developer chose one that is trustworthy. But Apple already has my credit info, buying is easy and safe.
But do graphics developers, of the sort who would be interested in a productivity tool, use the iPad as a development platform?
I agree with you on this, 100%.
But the reason they call you on speed, is because they can't measure stupid.
I say we drop all speed limits to 5mph everywhere, and limit passenger vehicles to 3 horsepower rubber cars. Traffic fatalities would plummet!
Of course, you'd have to exclude "starving to death on the way home" from the actual statistics. Better exclude road-rage shootings as well, come to think of it...
...
Their situation is unstable and the government's control is precarious. The population's desperation makes them unpredictable. Therefore they are constantly focused on actively pre-empting revolution, and that means being constantly focused on short-term goals. Provocative rhetoric might start an unwinnable war a year from now but keeps the civilian population from thinking for another day.
I believe you've nailed it. The last resort of a failing dictatorship is to divert public interest into a convenient war. That works for governments of all sizes.
Let's just hope it remains in the arena of egregious sabre-rattling, and nothing comes of it. Moving a few game pieces around is ok, as long as we don't see any rocket exhaust.
http://reviews.cnet.com/best-noise-canceling-headphones/
Ammonia bird, in a gilded cage.
As mentioned elsewhere, spin. Pretty much every rock in the solar system spins, to a greater or lesser degree. ...
Mod Up.
Even a solid rock of extinction size would do less damage if you break it up into more than one piece, and in doing so deflect significant chunks of it such that they would not even hit the earth. 2/3rds of the remaining pieces would land in the oceans as widely dispersed smaller chunks.
Mmm... no, don't think so. You've got to deal with the atmosphere heating up by that amount of rock dropping through it, big or small. If anything, the surface to volume ratio would mean we'd simply fry the atmosphere directly, rather than indirectly via the shock wave of impact. Kinetic energy is kinetic energy. We can be killed off by an amount of gravel equivalent to the full-sized rock.
Lead weights? A mini-neutron star?
Even though this works in theory, the asteroid is going to be many orders of magnitude more massive than the rocket in order to cause an extinction event, so this idea is basically like trying to get a flea to pull an elephant by tugging at its tail.
Start early. It's worth a lot of delta-V to simply start early enough.
Remember, any force will move it, and it will keep moving. A little force over a long, long time is more effective than an oh-god moment when it's a couple of months out.
Couldn't you achieve the same effect by having the tractor spacecraft orbit the big nasty at an appropriately elliptical orbit?
If you are going to use this method, then the more mass in your ship the better. Unfortunately, that means a more expensive launch. If you plan ahead, you figure out a way to accumulate debris and smaller rocks at some stable orbital point so when you need mass you can launch a light ship, go to the rockyard, and gather up more mass at reduced cost.
Send lightweight thrusters out, and grab a suitable nearby rock. Use it as your mass tractor.
the EM drive has no emissions:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EmDrive
(snerk) Might as well propose a Dean Drive.
Meanwhile, back to reality ...
Actually maybe a little farther to ensure you don't hit the asteroid with any of the propellant.
In a vacuum, the gas from the propellant won't dissipate quite as much...
An additional force to think about - if you're using gas propellant, or perhaps an electrostatically accelerated ion engine, you're going to build up quite a charge throwing those ions around, aren't you? You'd have to consider that in your calcs. Might change the shape of the attraction curve between the two bodies.
Because we are currently unable to judge the stability of the object, or it's internal mass distribution just by looking at it from long range.
Pushing it at any point might just lead to breaking off a small piece, or the spaceship slowly sinking into and through it.
If we miss the mass center, the push will mostly be transformed into rotation.
All these problems are a non issue with gravitiational pull.
The gravitational one could be fairly efficient, if you used a co-orbiting asteroid that was small enough to maneuver with the thrusters you could provide. Grab a rocky asteroid out there for mass, pilot it over to be captured by the gravity well of The Big Nasty ("TBM"). Use the method NdGT espouses, or possibly just bind enough extra mass with TBM to change its trajectory anyhow. Would that work? Maybe a couple of hundred, or thousand micro-thrusters to grab aggregate mass via swarm coordinated navigation could add enough mass to TBM incrementally to change the angle by the requisite amount.
Just curious...
And the entire music industry gathers together for a wonderful holiday charity chorale, featuring their stunning new number, "We Jump The Shark Together".
Really? What killed D3 for me was the lack of any recognisable variation in repeating levels. Really, too little content.
I'll stick with WoW for the time being.
Ooohh.... I want to play EA's new game, "Jump the Shark".
Or, publish a completely off-topic rant that annoys everyone who came here for intelligent commentary. Oh, and post it A/C.
By moving processing to the database, you're implicitly changing from scale-out (parallelism) to scale-up, aren't you? Unless you have a cluster with really, really fast row-level lock processing, the solution for faster DB is usually faster CPU and more memory for transaction buffers, not more computers. Larger buffers puts an additional overhead on memory-to-memory transfer (as well as more lock traffic & the delays that introduces) on a scale-out basis for databases, so the tendency is to scale up a database with fewer, but larger computers.
Innit?
(I'm using the almost archaic term "computers" here to indicate individual processing nodes. Saying "processors" has become ambiguous with the term "cores" I think.)
Check the most recent post from NYCL (New York Country Lawyer). There was a landmark judicial ruling quite recently that stated you cannot automatically connect an IP address to a person. This is hugely important.
In a flash, a loud, doppler shifted turbine whine is detected passing rapidly overhead.
That is disturbingly insightful and rather frightening.
Hmm.... sounds about right. When your huddled masses must be placated with bread and circuses, it's best to not make the ticket to the circus too expensive, or bar entry too exclusively.
You have no escape make your time.
Ha. Ha. Ha.
1) What is "impredance-matching boilerplate" ?
2) Aren't you a little young to be that bitter?