Actually, if you're going to give credit to someone for OGL, Apple is about the LAST company you should be thanking. Other than the fact that OGL was the only graphics API that worked on Mac, Apple has done ZERO to help promote, regulate, or stabilize OpenGL in the market. They have not contributed useful code, or participated in the ARB in any meaningful way.
They provided it with several hundred million new potential users, by building and selling the most successful (by number of users) platform in history[1] that uses OpenGL as a primary API, thus creating a huge incentive for developers to write OpenGL-based software. I think this does deserve credit.
[1]
at least it was at the time; has since been overtaken by Android (which probably wouldn't have enjoyed the same success against WinMobile it it hadn't had iOS to copy from)
Think of it as a super high density fuel that just takes a lot of energy on the ground to process.
It doesn't even have to be exothermic (net energy gain) on the spacecraft, without considering any ground processing. In other words, it's perfectly fine if, for each kWh of electric energy you supply into the engine, you only get e.g. 0.4 kWh of kinetic energy of exhaust gases (plasma) coming out of the engine's nozzle. What's much more important is that the engine puts that 0.4 kWh into a very tiny amount of plasma, so that the plasma's velocity is very high (for a given amount of kinetic energy, the velocity is proportional to the reciprocal of the square root of the mass). That velocity is the "specific impulse" of the engine, and it determines how much fuel mass you need to achieve a given delta-v of the vehicle.
If it's 'bad' to fork a project and not contribute all your changes back, what is the point of forking in the first place? Why not just contribute to the original project?
The only reason to do so is the desire to make changes that are not compatible with the original project.
Not really. The project may consist of several parts or subsystems, and you may want to fork in order to replace or refactor one or two of the subsystems. In that case, all changes you make to one of the other subsystems should still be easy to integrate back into the original project.
I was wondering if you could teach yourself to read rot13-encoded text fluently, to the point that you'd no longer be translating every word in your head, but instead reading and comprehending the ciphertext directly. Would it be like learning to read as a child? And when you've managed to read rot13 like that, would you have lost the ability to read normal text fluently?
I think the inner air cavities are being included as part of the volume in the density calculation, but the mass of the air in them is not, which is misleading.
My point was that if the cavities are connected to the outside, and the density of the carbon structure (without the air) is less than that of helium (which I find very hard to believe indeed), then the whole thing should rise and fly due to its buoyancy.
The density is measured including its interior space. In reality the interior space is filled with air and its realtive weight is the carbon structure alone.
To make it float you would have to find a way to seal off the interior structure and remove the air from that.
I don't understand that. If the inner air "cavities" are connected to the outside and thus have the outside air's vertical pressure gradient, they should exert the same buoyant force / upward "lift" on the carbon structure, or not?
Graphene Aerogel Takes World's Lightest Material Crown
This thing seems to consist mainly of air. Doesn't that stretch the definition of "material" quite a bit? If I create a 10-foot wireframe cube consisting of just 12 thin aluminium stiffeners, and define the whole interior of the thing as part of the "material", that's gonna have a pretty low density too.
I don't remember the exact number, but in the 90's President H. Bush was toying with the idea of a manned Mars mission and asked NASA if it can be done, and the reply he got was "Yes we can do it, for 200 billion", after which Bush quietly dropped the idea.
...and not long after that, the Mars_Direct proposal came along, which can be done with today's heavy-lift rockets, without assembling stuff in orbit, and much cheaper. AFAICS, it's just the political will that's missing.
This is a terrible development. The splintering of the Linux desktop into a bunch of incompatable window systems is the last thing we need and which has been prevented for years by the X standard. While the Mir says it will support X applications, the threat comes from the fact that there may also be Mir applications which will not be able to run on other distributions, will not be able to run on X server root displays of other distributions. Another danger is not only Canonical trying to create a fleet of Mir only applications that cannot run on X server, but as well, end up creating a driver mess with drivers that can only run on Mir, or where driver vendors will now be faced with supporting many incompatable driver APIs for all of these windown systems
My totally subjective impression is that the only "driver API" that halfway works is the stuff that comes straight out of "The Unix Time-Sharing System" by Kernighan&Ritchie in 1974. I.e., things that map nicely to byte buckets in/dev, and maybe a bunch of ioctls (although things get shaky there already). After that, it's mostly been dwindling down, with the development of X11 being a prime example -- "we just program the video hardware from userspace because everything else is not portable and we couldn't figure it out anyway".
but all you see of Mars is a fleeting glimpse over the course of a few hours as you zoom past.
Probably not, since you're passing over the night side. All you'd see of Mars at closest approach would be a huge, pitch black disk that covers almost half the sky.
for the first time since 1972, we would again send humans so far out that they can see the whole earth as a sphere
for the first time ever, we would send humans into interplanetary space, so far away that all celestial bodies except the Sun (but including Earth) would appear as star-like points in the sky.
All the plans I've seen so far involve single launches, which dramatically decreases the things a manned vehicle can accomplish on a mission outside Earth's orbit. They have the ISS right there, why not launch three or four modules, strap them together next to the ISS, and then go for Mars with quite a bit more breathing room?
If you have "three or four" modules instead of one, you're also gonna need three or four times the amount of fuel and rocket thrusters, which weighs much more than the modules themselves. In additional to strapping the modules together, you'll also need to strap those thrusters and their fuel tanks together and make them work in a coordinated fashion as one large rocket drive. That's never been done before.
He doesn't say that bicycles produce more CO2 than cars, he says that:
Drivers pay road tax to cover the costs of roads, including bike lanes, why shouldn't bikes pay some of this?
Cycling increases your respiration rate so produces more CO2 than not cycling.
Both of these are true.
Well, the second is probably not. If your heart rate and respiration increases, you burn more calories, which means you'll eat more, which ends up requiring more plants to be grown to feed you, and those additional plants will extract more CO2 from the atmosphere. The correlation is indirect of course, but averaged globally, you should indeed find that the increased CO2 emission rate of the cyclist matches the increased CO2 absorption rate by the additional plants being grown for them. And this is not the case for cars, because they burn fossil fuels, which emits CO2 that is not replenished at the same rate by some other process.
Requiring a global CA to sign a ssh key would in no way make it less secure. It can't.
The OP was apparently talking about a scenario in which the client is hard-wired to only trust host keys that have been signed by a specific, global CA. And that would be less secure. You would no longer be able to just create and use your own host key at any time.
Instead of screwing around with politics, I have a much better idea...
Replace the kernel idle loop with a UEFI signing key cracker. Let it chow down on Microsoft's key.
More promising option would be to just collect money and bribe someone inside MS to hand us the key.
I guess the batteries are for emergency situations where the engines don't work. During normal operation, the engine-driven generators supply all the electricity. I think.
Slashdot Mirror
[citation needed]
Actually, if you're going to give credit to someone for OGL, Apple is about the LAST company you should be thanking. Other than the fact that OGL was the only graphics API that worked on Mac, Apple has done ZERO to help promote, regulate, or stabilize OpenGL in the market. They have not contributed useful code, or participated in the ARB in any meaningful way.
They provided it with several hundred million new potential users, by building and selling the most successful (by number of users) platform in history[1] that uses OpenGL as a primary API, thus creating a huge incentive for developers to write OpenGL-based software. I think this does deserve credit.
[1] at least it was at the time; has since been overtaken by Android (which probably wouldn't have enjoyed the same success against WinMobile it it hadn't had iOS to copy from)
why spend money on your own API when someone will do the work for you?
If Microsoft thought like that, DirectX never would have happened in the first place.
Oh yeah, and what do you use for powering the magnetic field to contain the plasma?
The design proposed here uses inertial confinement and pulsed (rather than continuous) operation.
Think of it as a super high density fuel that just takes a lot of energy on the ground to process.
It doesn't even have to be exothermic (net energy gain) on the spacecraft, without considering any ground processing. In other words, it's perfectly fine if, for each kWh of electric energy you supply into the engine, you only get e.g. 0.4 kWh of kinetic energy of exhaust gases (plasma) coming out of the engine's nozzle. What's much more important is that the engine puts that 0.4 kWh into a very tiny amount of plasma, so that the plasma's velocity is very high (for a given amount of kinetic energy, the velocity is proportional to the reciprocal of the square root of the mass). That velocity is the "specific impulse" of the engine, and it determines how much fuel mass you need to achieve a given delta-v of the vehicle.
If it's 'bad' to fork a project and not contribute all your changes back, what is the point of forking in the first place? Why not just contribute to the original project? The only reason to do so is the desire to make changes that are not compatible with the original project.
Not really. The project may consist of several parts or subsystems, and you may want to fork in order to replace or refactor one or two of the subsystems. In that case, all changes you make to one of the other subsystems should still be easy to integrate back into the original project.
I was wondering if you could teach yourself to read rot13-encoded text fluently, to the point that you'd no longer be translating every word in your head, but instead reading and comprehending the ciphertext directly. Would it be like learning to read as a child? And when you've managed to read rot13 like that, would you have lost the ability to read normal text fluently?
I think the inner air cavities are being included as part of the volume in the density calculation, but the mass of the air in them is not, which is misleading.
My point was that if the cavities are connected to the outside, and the density of the carbon structure (without the air) is less than that of helium (which I find very hard to believe indeed), then the whole thing should rise and fly due to its buoyancy.
The density is measured including its interior space. In reality the interior space is filled with air and its realtive weight is the carbon structure alone. To make it float you would have to find a way to seal off the interior structure and remove the air from that.
I don't understand that. If the inner air "cavities" are connected to the outside and thus have the outside air's vertical pressure gradient, they should exert the same buoyant force / upward "lift" on the carbon structure, or not?
This thing seems to consist mainly of air. Doesn't that stretch the definition of "material" quite a bit? If I create a 10-foot wireframe cube consisting of just 12 thin aluminium stiffeners, and define the whole interior of the thing as part of the "material", that's gonna have a pretty low density too.
I don't remember the exact number, but in the 90's President H. Bush was toying with the idea of a manned Mars mission and asked NASA if it can be done, and the reply he got was "Yes we can do it, for 200 billion", after which Bush quietly dropped the idea.
...and not long after that, the Mars_Direct proposal came along, which can be done with today's heavy-lift rockets, without assembling stuff in orbit, and much cheaper. AFAICS, it's just the political will that's missing.
But why wouldn't they like me using this product?
Maybe because the infrastructure costs more money than comes in via ad revenue, so whenever you're using this product, they incur a loss.
(JFTR, personally I'm an avid GR user, so I'm upset with that decision too)
This is a terrible development. The splintering of the Linux desktop into a bunch of incompatable window systems is the last thing we need and which has been prevented for years by the X standard. While the Mir says it will support X applications, the threat comes from the fact that there may also be Mir applications which will not be able to run on other distributions, will not be able to run on X server root displays of other distributions. Another danger is not only Canonical trying to create a fleet of Mir only applications that cannot run on X server, but as well, end up creating a driver mess with drivers that can only run on Mir, or where driver vendors will now be faced with supporting many incompatable driver APIs for all of these windown systems
My totally subjective impression is that the only "driver API" that halfway works is the stuff that comes straight out of "The Unix Time-Sharing System" by Kernighan&Ritchie in 1974. I.e., things that map nicely to byte buckets in /dev, and maybe a bunch of ioctls (although things get shaky there already). After that, it's mostly been dwindling down, with the development of X11 being a prime example -- "we just program the video hardware from userspace because everything else is not portable and we couldn't figure it out anyway".
but all you see of Mars is a fleeting glimpse over the course of a few hours as you zoom past.
Probably not, since you're passing over the night side. All you'd see of Mars at closest approach would be a huge, pitch black disk that covers almost half the sky.
What's the point of a manned ballistic fly-by?
Two things:
All the plans I've seen so far involve single launches, which dramatically decreases the things a manned vehicle can accomplish on a mission outside Earth's orbit. They have the ISS right there, why not launch three or four modules, strap them together next to the ISS, and then go for Mars with quite a bit more breathing room?
If you have "three or four" modules instead of one, you're also gonna need three or four times the amount of fuel and rocket thrusters, which weighs much more than the modules themselves. In additional to strapping the modules together, you'll also need to strap those thrusters and their fuel tanks together and make them work in a coordinated fashion as one large rocket drive. That's never been done before.
He doesn't say that bicycles produce more CO2 than cars, he says that:
Both of these are true.
Well, the second is probably not. If your heart rate and respiration increases, you burn more calories, which means you'll eat more, which ends up requiring more plants to be grown to feed you, and those additional plants will extract more CO2 from the atmosphere. The correlation is indirect of course, but averaged globally, you should indeed find that the increased CO2 emission rate of the cyclist matches the increased CO2 absorption rate by the additional plants being grown for them. And this is not the case for cars, because they burn fossil fuels, which emits CO2 that is not replenished at the same rate by some other process.
Requiring a global CA to sign a ssh key would in no way make it less secure. It can't.
The OP was apparently talking about a scenario in which the client is hard-wired to only trust host keys that have been signed by a specific, global CA. And that would be less secure. You would no longer be able to just create and use your own host key at any time.
Instead of screwing around with politics, I have a much better idea... Replace the kernel idle loop with a UEFI signing key cracker. Let it chow down on Microsoft's key.
More promising option would be to just collect money and bribe someone inside MS to hand us the key.
Which would take years to come to any conclusion (if at all), at which time all the damage would've been done already.
Outperforms in reliability, huh? bullshit
Of course it doesn't work, but look how fast it is!
Suffocation in the cement mixer?
The only bad guys you can safely portray in movies are white guys.
Well, not all of them. Gay white guys are clearly off-limits, for example.
I guess the batteries are for emergency situations where the engines don't work. During normal operation, the engine-driven generators supply all the electricity. I think.
If we implement safety features on the more expensive airliners, the safety features will eventually trickle down to the less expensive ones.
I realize you're being sarcastic, but this kinda worked for the car companies.