Exactly where do you get your figure of hundreds of kilometers per second? What kind of device is making that happen? Also, km/sec is a velocity, not an acceleration. Your failure to distiguish these does not give you credibility.
Keep in mind that the Earth-Moon distance is about 400,000 km. You are talking about a transit that is measured in hours. Rockets let us achieve transits of days.
Taldo, go look in a mirror. The person looking back at you is a moron. "Decelerating as much as it could"? What kind of technical statement is that? Was it saying to itself "I think I can, I think I can...."?
Apollo re-entry was almost entirely ballistic. Look at the command module. It's a blunt cone. Do you see any huge rocket there for decelerating? No. What was decelerating it was the atmosphere, which burned up a thick metallic heat shield in the process.
Rocks land on the earth all the time. They punch holes in rooftops, and damage automobiles. Only rarely, for particularly *huge* rocks, does any substantial damage occur.
Your mumbling about distance is practically irrelevant. The gravitational acceleration over most of the Moon-Earth distance is either toward the Moon or negligible, until you get to low Earth orbit.
Consider more carefully the metorite example. Recall that kinetic energy is only linear in mass.
This is a joke. What you have said is no more than "what I agree with, is Republican, what I don't is Democrat." Which, translated, is "I'm a Republican." How is that at all relevant to JFK?
Moral integrity: drunk daughters, cocaine usage, draft dodging? Claiming "no decision has been made" when a decision has been made? Far worse is Bush's overweeningly smug "God is telling me to do this, so it must be right" attitude.
I'd rather have an immoral but responsible person who realizes he can make mistakes to a moral person who believes he is infallible.
The circulation of money is irrelevant. In the end, there is a certain amount of goods and services that can be produced by the resources (labor & capital) of the U.S. That (GNP/GDP) is the size of the economy. Taxation determines how much of that is ultimately used in ways that the government decides upon, either directly (by spending) or indirectly (by causing money to change hands, so that, for instance a working person's labor pays for a senior citizen's consumption.)
There isn't any magic by which the money can be made to go around more often and cause more stuff to be produced. Just that the choices of consumption vs. investment (capital investment) might be made differently with changes in tax policy. That is a long term view. When you take this longer term (dynamic scoring) into effect, you get *at most* about 25% of the tax cut being "paid for" by economic growth.
Maybe all you Slashdot readers are too young to remember, but the U.S., particularly the Air Force, had all sorts of grand ideas about moon bases (by the year 2000!!!), which never came to pass, because we realized there really wasn't any point.
I think all this noise from the Chinese is the Red Army Air Force having its fun coming up with all these ideas to bring China into the 20th century. China's leaders have better ideas, having to do with microchip fabs and so forth, to bring China into the 21st century. Which do you think will get priority?
Once the Chinese leadership realize that matching the grand achievements of 1970 in 2006 is not that impressive after all, probably this will be quietly dropped.
There is this thing call the "atmosphere" between space and the ground. It tends to burn up and slow down things that are falling to Earth.
Perhaps you heard of this large object called the Space Shuttle that is much more than 50 kilograms in mass, and fell to earth recently, but didn't cause any significant damage on the ground? (Not to belittle the fate of the crew.) For comparison, in 1992 a 12 kg (mass *after* falling through the atmosphere) metorite in Peekskill NY had the huge impact of smashing the trunk of someone's car.
The only way that kilogram masses have a significant effect on the ground is when they are missile re-entry vehicles with explosive (especially nuclear) payloads. Sure the Chinese might make a nuclear missile base on the Moon, but why?
Given that the Chinese been pretty thrifty in their ground-based strategic deterrent doesn't lead me to believe they would spend a huge amount of money (and cause huge effects in international relations) to build a moon-based arsenal, when they could much more cheaply upgrade their ground-based missles and basing to make them more deadly and survivable.
The keyboard player is the only one stuck with the pitch the tuner gave them.
Strings, singers, and wind instruments *should* adjust the intonation slightly depending on the key. Whether the note is written as D-flat or C-sharp determines what harmonic function the note is playing in the scale, so you shade it a bit to make it sound right. Why else do you see notations of double-flat and double-sharp, which all have white-key or single-accidental enharmonic equivalents?
Only rarely are tonal pieces going to have both C-sharp and D-flat (concert pitch) written at the same time, so you won't get dissonance from enharmonic tones, but if the piece changes key, the C-sharp in one key of the piece is not going to be identical to the D-flat in another key. Choruses and unaccompanied singers in particular are not going to be mechanically in tune with equal temperament, yet they will still be in tune.
This is of course a big deal in the historical music community (which I am not a part of) because it used to be that keyboards were tuned to be in particular keys, and would have sounded awful if you tried to play in keys too unrelated to the temperament. Only after Bach's time did keyboards start to get universally tuned in equal temperament.
By "academic" I assume you mean as in "create Orbitz." Lisp isn't just Scheme that you learned in your programming language survey course.
If you think Orbitz was a straightforward web application, ask yourself why it took 30 years to replicate the legacy mainframe systems that handle airline ticketing. The problem is HARD.
Lisp's dynamism isn't just "academic" in nature. It allows you to shape the language into exactly the tool you need to solve the problem. Not an object-oriented hammer which treats every problem like a nail, or a functional scalpel which slices but can't hammer, but whatever kind of language you need: hammer, screwdriver, buzz saw.
Lisp has about a dozen features of which other languages have only about two each. If you focus on any one feature, you can replicate it in any language, especially if you only need a toy example. What you can't replicate is the synergy of all those features working together in an industrial strength language.
For example: Lisp macros seamlessly integrate with every other aspect of the language, and have the full power of the language at hand to transform your program. They let you treat your whole program as data. In C++, you get preprocessor macros, which have their own warts, or template programming, which looks like a completely different language from C, or you get to use STL, which is yet another sub-language. In Lisp, the equivalent features all work the same, and pull together.
I have just scratched the surface of Lisp's dynamism. Sure, for any fixed set of example functions, you can create the same structure in a static language.
However, in Lisp, I can *redefine* functions continuously, and previous references to those functions remain intact.
At any point, in my web server example, I could change the definition of any one of the generating functions, *as* the program is running, without stopping and recompiling the whole program. This kind of dynamism is pervasive throughout the language, and not just in some special libraries one can decide to use. Moreover, I don't have to fit my problem into the framework of inheritance, if it isn't natural.
Conceptually similar does not mean equivalent in power. Lisp has been doing functions for almost 50 years now. The C++ community is just beginning to get the vaguest idea. It's the difference between real French cheese, for instance, and "american" "pasteurized processed cheese product." Big difference between the real thing and a crude imitation.
What's "wrong" (rather, missing, or inconvenient) is the ability to fill f with pointer to functions that were not defined when the compilation happened.
In Lisp, I could take the contents of a Web form, for instance, and use that to make a function that would encode, for instance, your preferences in music, then use that newly-formed function to rate MP3's as your are browsing.
Then, that rating function can be stored in a variable for later use on the music.
You could implement this in C, by storing the array of three values, but it is much less flexible. My make-rating-function could return one out of any number of functions, which take different information out of the web-form-contents. For instance, classical music listeners have very different ways of choosing music, so you would give them a music-rating-function that looked at composers more than performers, while rock fans would look more at bands that groups of people tend to rate similarly.
Once you make the choice of functions depend on the data, it becomes cumbersome to do in C. It's like doing polymorphism in C: you need to start making case statements all over the place to check what kind of customer you are dealing with. Lisp makes this kind of stuff easy to express---dealing with functions is as easy as dealing with integers and floats.
Re: Penny minting - Inflation?
on
Making Change
·
· Score: 1
I wonder how much affect this has on inflation, since uncontrolled minting of money usually does cause inflation to go up.
It isn't uncontrolled, so it doesn't have an effect. The Fed doesn't distribute bags of pennies willy-nilly; it gives bags of pennies to banks who give them bills (virtually) in return. Exchanging 100 pennies for a dollar is not inflationary.
I suspect the Fed charges a shipping expense for large coin shipments, and that possibly motivates the penny drives.
On the other hand, coin is profitable for the Treasury (not the Fed): for bills, the Fed only pays the cost of printing the bills, but for coins, the Fed pays face value to the Treasury. Since the coins cost less to make than the face value, the U.S. Treasury gets the profit, called "seignorage." That is one of the main motivations for the state quarter series: a bunch of people (myself included) pay $.25 each for the privilege of getting a stamped piece of metal, which we will never return to circulation. Most quarters eventually wear out enough that the Treasury has to eat the cost when the Fed returns them. Not so if they spend the indefinite future in a box!
Pay attention. The words were "SET UP" not just participate in, show up, or pay dues to but set up, as in create, form, bring into existence, start, build, make.
The U.S. was one of the initial signatories to the U.N. treaty. The U.N. was *created by* the United States. Not by the "poor countries" that you assert. The name "United Nations" was made up by FDR. The charter was based on negotiations held at Dumbarton Oaks in the U.S., including the U.S. government. U.S. ratification of the charter was a condition of the U.N. coming into being.
Well, you'll have a very interesting time if you try to visit a foreign country (I'm assuming you are in the U.S. now) and don't recognize the local "foreign" authorities. Try to rob a bank in Germany, for instance, or, more likely for you, not pay taxes there, and a foreign entity is going to come lock you up, and the U.S. isn't going to be able to do much more than ask to visit you in prison to ask you if your ass is still intact.
I'm guessing you've never thought about actually visiting a foreign country, though.
More to the point, when the U.S. signs and ratifies treaties creating an international organization, such as the U.N., do you just ignore that fact?
the GPL is designed to grant you the rights copyright takes away
I don't want to be overly pedantic, but the GPL is a license designed to grant rights to license-holders that most copyright holders do not grant. Copyrights don't deprive you of rights---they allow copyright holders to enforce their copyrights. A second effect is to restrict you from exercising rights that you would have in the "absence of copyright," i.e. for works in the public domain, such as to distribute derivative works without making the source accessible.
probably worth $10-$20 for plenty of people willing to pay for a bit of convenience.
If these people were willing to pay for convenience, they wouldn't be case-modding, now, would they? They would have just bought a G4 PowerBook and been done with it.
Law is not a science. There is no scientific proof that determines whether or not the IRS can collect taxes from you. That is a legal question, decided by the legal system. The law has no other meaning.
Your mistake is where you assume that a layperson with a law dictionary and a copy of the Constitution is qualified to answer questions of constitutional law. That has never been the case. That's why there have been lawyers and judges since the dawn of written law.
You are right up there with all the nut cases who believe that any old guy with a compass and straightedge is qualified to determine whether the circle can be squared. Even though mathematically-trained people can understand that it has been proven impossible, and it is no longer up for debate.
"Study" and "effort" in this field include going to law school, not reading the radical rantings of some unschooled kook.
To deal with your objection: dig far enough back in the male urethra (that's the painful part) and you get to either the bladder or the testes. In the female, the split is somewhat more, ahem, accessible.
What I'm not particularly clear on is whether the connection to the ovaries is topologically equivalent to the connection to the testes.
Your post is somewhat interesting, but ignores a simpler argument: that neither President's policies really had anything to do with the statistics you quote. In both cases, the responsibility probably rests more squarely with the Federal Reserve. As in Paul Volcker killing Carter-era stagflation with the recession early in Reagan's presidency, and Alan Greenspan carefully regulating monetary policy, but also talking about how the "New Economy" was really new, and not a speculative bubble.
Bush has an undergraduate degree from Yale and a MBA from Harvard.
If you are going to compare Bush and Clinton, you should realize that Clinton wasn't the son of George H. W. Bush or the grandson of Prescott Bush, which put GWB's getting into (and coasting through) Yale into a somewhat less impressive realm. Keep in mind also that GWB is quite proud of having been a C student at Yale, whereas Clinton was a Rhodes Scholar.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly where do you get your figure of hundreds of kilometers per second? What kind of device is making that happen? Also, km/sec is a velocity, not an acceleration. Your failure to distiguish these does not give you credibility.
Keep in mind that the Earth-Moon distance is about 400,000 km. You are talking about a transit that is measured in hours. Rockets let us achieve transits of days.
Taldo, go look in a mirror. The person looking back at you is a moron. "Decelerating as much as it could"? What kind of technical statement is that? Was it saying to itself "I think I can, I think I can...."?
Apollo re-entry was almost entirely ballistic. Look at the command module. It's a blunt cone. Do you see any huge rocket there for decelerating? No. What was decelerating it was the atmosphere, which burned up a thick metallic heat shield in the process.
Rocks land on the earth all the time. They punch holes in rooftops, and damage automobiles. Only rarely, for particularly *huge* rocks, does any substantial damage occur.
Your mumbling about distance is practically irrelevant. The gravitational acceleration over most of the Moon-Earth distance is either toward the Moon or negligible, until you get to low Earth orbit.
Consider more carefully the metorite example. Recall that kinetic energy is only linear in mass.
"very much handled like a Republican."
This is a joke. What you have said is no more than "what I agree with, is Republican, what I don't is Democrat." Which, translated, is "I'm a Republican." How is that at all relevant to JFK?
Moral integrity: drunk daughters, cocaine usage, draft dodging? Claiming "no decision has been made" when a decision has been made? Far worse is Bush's overweeningly smug "God is telling me to do this, so it must be right" attitude.
I'd rather have an immoral but responsible person who realizes he can make mistakes to a moral person who believes he is infallible.
The circulation of money is irrelevant. In the end, there is a certain amount of goods and services that can be produced by the resources (labor & capital) of the U.S. That (GNP/GDP) is the size of the economy. Taxation determines how much of that is ultimately used in ways that the government decides upon, either directly (by spending) or indirectly (by causing money to change hands, so that, for instance a working person's labor pays for a senior citizen's consumption.)
There isn't any magic by which the money can be made to go around more often and cause more stuff to be produced. Just that the choices of consumption vs. investment (capital investment) might be made differently with changes in tax policy. That is a long term view. When you take this longer term (dynamic scoring) into effect, you get *at most* about 25% of the tax cut being "paid for" by economic growth.
(signed) Richard Nixon
Maybe all you Slashdot readers are too young to remember, but the U.S., particularly the Air Force, had all sorts of grand ideas about moon bases (by the year 2000!!!), which never came to pass, because we realized there really wasn't any point.
I think all this noise from the Chinese is the Red Army Air Force having its fun coming up with all these ideas to bring China into the 20th century. China's leaders have better ideas, having to do with microchip fabs and so forth, to bring China into the 21st century. Which do you think will get priority?
Once the Chinese leadership realize that matching the grand achievements of 1970 in 2006 is not that impressive after all, probably this will be quietly dropped.
There is this thing call the "atmosphere" between space and the ground. It tends to burn up and slow down things that are falling to Earth.
Perhaps you heard of this large object called the Space Shuttle that is much more than 50 kilograms in mass, and fell to earth recently, but didn't cause any significant damage on the ground? (Not to belittle the fate of the crew.) For comparison, in 1992 a 12 kg (mass *after* falling through the atmosphere) metorite in Peekskill NY had the huge impact of smashing the trunk of someone's car.
The only way that kilogram masses have a significant effect on the ground is when they are missile re-entry vehicles with explosive (especially nuclear) payloads. Sure the Chinese might make a nuclear missile base on the Moon, but why?
Given that the Chinese been pretty thrifty in their ground-based strategic deterrent doesn't lead me to believe they would spend a huge amount of money (and cause huge effects in international relations) to build a moon-based arsenal, when they could much more cheaply upgrade their ground-based missles and basing to make them more deadly and survivable.
The keyboard player is the only one stuck with the pitch the tuner gave them.
Strings, singers, and wind instruments *should* adjust the intonation slightly depending on the key. Whether the note is written as D-flat or C-sharp determines what harmonic function the note is playing in the scale, so you shade it a bit to make it sound right. Why else do you see notations of double-flat and double-sharp, which all have white-key or single-accidental enharmonic equivalents?
Only rarely are tonal pieces going to have both C-sharp and D-flat (concert pitch) written at the same time, so you won't get dissonance from enharmonic tones, but if the piece changes key, the C-sharp in one key of the piece is not going to be identical to the D-flat in another key. Choruses and unaccompanied singers in particular are not going to be mechanically in tune with equal temperament, yet they will still be in tune.
This is of course a big deal in the historical music community (which I am not a part of) because it used to be that keyboards were tuned to be in particular keys, and would have sounded awful if you tried to play in keys too unrelated to the temperament. Only after Bach's time did keyboards start to get universally tuned in equal temperament.
By "academic" I assume you mean as in "create Orbitz." Lisp isn't just Scheme that you learned in your programming language survey course.
If you think Orbitz was a straightforward web application, ask yourself why it took 30 years to replicate the legacy mainframe systems that handle airline ticketing. The problem is HARD.
Lisp's dynamism isn't just "academic" in nature. It allows you to shape the language into exactly the tool you need to solve the problem. Not an object-oriented hammer which treats every problem like a nail, or a functional scalpel which slices but can't hammer, but whatever kind of language you need: hammer, screwdriver, buzz saw.
Lisp has about a dozen features of which other languages have only about two each. If you focus on any one feature, you can replicate it in any language, especially if you only need a toy example. What you can't replicate is the synergy of all those features working together in an industrial strength language.
For example: Lisp macros seamlessly integrate with every other aspect of the language, and have the full power of the language at hand to transform your program. They let you treat your whole program as data. In C++, you get preprocessor macros, which have their own warts, or template programming, which looks like a completely different language from C, or you get to use STL, which is yet another sub-language. In Lisp, the equivalent features all work the same, and pull together.
I have just scratched the surface of Lisp's dynamism. Sure, for any fixed set of example functions, you can create the same structure in a static language.
However, in Lisp, I can *redefine* functions continuously, and previous references to those functions remain intact.
At any point, in my web server example, I could change the definition of any one of the generating functions, *as* the program is running, without stopping and recompiling the whole program. This kind of dynamism is pervasive throughout the language, and not just in some special libraries one can decide to use. Moreover, I don't have to fit my problem into the framework of inheritance, if it isn't natural.
Conceptually similar does not mean equivalent in power. Lisp has been doing functions for almost 50 years now. The C++ community is just beginning to get the vaguest idea. It's the difference between real French cheese, for instance, and "american" "pasteurized processed cheese product." Big difference between the real thing and a crude imitation.
What's "wrong" (rather, missing, or inconvenient) is the ability to fill f with pointer to functions that were not defined when the compilation happened.
.....
In Lisp, I could take the contents of a Web form, for instance, and use that to make a function that would encode, for instance, your preferences in music, then use that newly-formed function to rate MP3's as your are browsing.
(defun make-rating-function (web-form-contents)
(lambda (music)
(+ (* (country-rating web-form-contents) (country-genre music))
(* (rock-rating web-form-contents) (rock-genre music))
(* (classical-rating web-form-contents) (classical-genre music)))))
Then, that rating function can be stored in a variable for later use on the music.
You could implement this in C, by storing the array of three values, but it is much less flexible. My make-rating-function could return one out of any number of functions, which take different information out of the web-form-contents. For instance, classical music listeners have very different ways of choosing music, so you would give them a music-rating-function that looked at composers more than performers, while rock fans would look more at bands that groups of people tend to rate similarly.
(defun make-rating-function (web-form-contents)
(if (classical-music-lover web-form-contents)
(make-classical-rating web-form-contents)
(if (rock-music-lover web-form-contents)
(make-rock-rating web-form-contents)
where make-rock-rating is written as above.
Once you make the choice of functions depend on the data, it becomes cumbersome to do in C. It's like doing polymorphism in C: you need to start making case statements all over the place to check what kind of customer you are dealing with. Lisp makes this kind of stuff easy to express---dealing with functions is as easy as dealing with integers and floats.
I like it!
I wonder how much affect this has on inflation, since uncontrolled minting of money usually does cause inflation to go up.
It isn't uncontrolled, so it doesn't have an effect. The Fed doesn't distribute bags of pennies willy-nilly; it gives bags of pennies to banks who give them bills (virtually) in return. Exchanging 100 pennies for a dollar is not inflationary.
I suspect the Fed charges a shipping expense for large coin shipments, and that possibly motivates the penny drives.
On the other hand, coin is profitable for the Treasury (not the Fed): for bills, the Fed only pays the cost of printing the bills, but for coins, the Fed pays face value to the Treasury. Since the coins cost less to make than the face value, the U.S. Treasury gets the profit, called "seignorage." That is one of the main motivations for the state quarter series: a bunch of people (myself included) pay $.25 each for the privilege of getting a stamped piece of metal, which we will never return to circulation. Most quarters eventually wear out enough that the Treasury has to eat the cost when the Fed returns them. Not so if they spend the indefinite future in a box!
Pay attention. The words were "SET UP" not just participate in, show up, or pay dues to but set up, as in create, form, bring into existence, start, build, make.
The U.S. was one of the initial signatories to the U.N. treaty. The U.N. was *created by* the United States. Not by the "poor countries" that you assert. The name "United Nations" was made up by FDR. The charter was based on negotiations held at Dumbarton Oaks in the U.S., including the U.S. government. U.S. ratification of the charter was a condition of the U.N. coming into being.
If you believe the U.N. was actually set up by the poor countries, why do you think the U.S. has a veto on virtually everything the organization does?
Fact: it was set up by the victors in the Second World War, including the good-ole-U.S.A.
Well, you'll have a very interesting time if you try to visit a foreign country (I'm assuming you are in the U.S. now) and don't recognize the local "foreign" authorities. Try to rob a bank in Germany, for instance, or, more likely for you, not pay taxes there, and a foreign entity is going to come lock you up, and the U.S. isn't going to be able to do much more than ask to visit you in prison to ask you if your ass is still intact.
I'm guessing you've never thought about actually visiting a foreign country, though.
More to the point, when the U.S. signs and ratifies treaties creating an international organization, such as the U.N., do you just ignore that fact?
the GPL is designed to grant you the rights copyright takes away
I don't want to be overly pedantic, but the GPL is a license designed to grant rights to license-holders that most copyright holders do not grant. Copyrights don't deprive you of rights---they allow copyright holders to enforce their copyrights. A second effect is to restrict you from exercising rights that you would have in the "absence of copyright," i.e. for works in the public domain, such as to distribute derivative works without making the source accessible.
How's this:
1) In Soviet Russia
2) Natalie Portman petrifies
3) ???
4) YOUR hot grits!
probably worth $10-$20 for plenty of people willing to pay for a bit of convenience.
If these people were willing to pay for convenience, they wouldn't be case-modding, now, would they? They would have just bought a G4 PowerBook and been done with it.
Law is not a science. There is no scientific proof that determines whether or not the IRS can collect taxes from you. That is a legal question, decided by the legal system. The law has no other meaning.
Your mistake is where you assume that a layperson with a law dictionary and a copy of the Constitution is qualified to answer questions of constitutional law. That has never been the case. That's why there have been lawyers and judges since the dawn of written law.
You are right up there with all the nut cases who believe that any old guy with a compass and straightedge is qualified to determine whether the circle can be squared. Even though mathematically-trained people can understand that it has been proven impossible, and it is no longer up for debate.
"Study" and "effort" in this field include going to law school, not reading the radical rantings of some unschooled kook.
You know, the answer is probably ambiguous.
To deal with your objection: dig far enough back in the male urethra (that's the painful part) and you get to either the bladder or the testes. In the female, the split is somewhat more, ahem, accessible.
What I'm not particularly clear on is whether the connection to the ovaries is topologically equivalent to the connection to the testes.
Your post is somewhat interesting, but ignores a simpler argument: that neither President's policies really had anything to do with the statistics you quote. In both cases, the responsibility probably rests more squarely with the Federal Reserve. As in Paul Volcker killing Carter-era stagflation with the recession early in Reagan's presidency, and Alan Greenspan carefully regulating monetary policy, but also talking about how the "New Economy" was really new, and not a speculative bubble.
Bush has an undergraduate degree from Yale and a MBA from Harvard.
If you are going to compare Bush and Clinton, you should realize that Clinton wasn't the son of George H. W. Bush or the grandson of Prescott Bush, which put GWB's getting into (and coasting through) Yale into a somewhat less impressive realm. Keep in mind also that GWB is quite proud of having been a C student at Yale, whereas Clinton was a Rhodes Scholar.