You guys are so far off the Ada mark that you might as well be choking your chicken at the A&P. Would you please learn some little thing about the subject?
Microsoft bought off all the national bodies of ISO when they ramrodded through their undocumented and impossible to implement "document standard". If ISO knew anything about business processes or standards development they could have prevented that panel-stuffing result. And yet one of the standards they set is business processes for just this situation. I don't trust them any more and I don't think you should either. They are too easily swayed by corporate interests.
Ada's cool in the esoteric nerd sort of way. Like SNOBOL or APL. I shared a girlfriend with one of the Strawman implementors of ADA and knew him moderately well. She was hot (she's probably a great-grandmother now) and he was cool, it was fun, and I'm still fond of ADA. I'm not fond of overloading operators and keywords in an RTOS in the practical sense, but as an artistic exploration of tech potentials I'm all for it as long as you don't make it the OS/language for a drone or something similar. I've never been a fan of garbage collection. It solved some problems I'd rather work around. Sadly Ada went rather overboard in the dynamic re-purposing of symbols, resulting in some unfortunate but predictable side-effects and plain code that had indeterminate use based on context.
If you can't count on a word symbol to mean a quite specific and limited thing, you can't anticipate what your app will do. In my own mind, that was the problem with ADA. By subtexting and repurposing everyting - including the "=" operator and keywords like "if" they created a thing that was useful for mapping and mimicking human intellectual processes but not for doing useful stuff.
No, it's a simple inertial thing. The prime jumping-off point for interstellar travel from Earth is L2, as it utilizes the moon as a gravity slingshot. But the target has to be somewhere close to the solar system plane, or it loses the advantages of Earth's orbit being so far out of Sol's gravity well, and Earth's proper motion around Sol as well.
No, I mean the Square-cube law. In particular that the strength of radio emissions fall off at a ratio of the square of the power to the cube of the distance. Stars are very far and this law destroys the effectiveness of radiological communications over such distances.
You make me post this in every extrasolar planetary thread and it's really annoying.
Voyager 1 is nowhere near current technology. We have ion thrusters now. We have supercomputers now. Hell, your cellphone would have been a supercomputer to the guys who designed that thing. We have water on the moon, in near-earth asteroids, and a limitless supply in Ceres, and we didn't know that then. We have new methods of separating that water into hydrogen and oxygen on orbit efficiently, so it doesn't have to be hoisted out of our gravity well. We have far more understanding about long-term space missions and habitation. Plants grow in space! We didn't know that either. We have commercial rockets that can dock with the space station: an absurd sci-fi fantasy back then. We have robots who can do the work of gathering fuel without too much supervision. We have robots that could survive the kind of acceleration provided by a 1000 km railgun that it would take to put the robots there in a reasonable time, and a place in low-g to put that rail gun and robots to build it. And software to put on the robots that apparently can withstand a 24 year ping time.
In fact, recent learnings about the Voyager Anomaly point to an obvious way to propel interstellar spacecraft: Put a couple dozen 200 MW fission reactors behind some heat/radiation shields and point them in the opposite direction from where you want to go, and let them melt down. The heat provides thrust. At 745 W per HP, that's good for a few thousand horsepower of thrust. Since a Newton is a Horsepower-second, near enough, and the reactors run for many years, that's insane number of Newtons. We actually used to have a project that worked on this theory called Project Orion.
So, for example, get the robots to gather up some water and refine it into LH2/LO2. Slide some of that fuel down to LEO and pick up a commercial hydrox booster and lift it into high orbit and fill it. Repeat until you have seven of them. Now arrange them in a filled hexagon at L2 orbit just beyond the moon, and fill with hydrox. Strap your meltdown-driven spacecraft and habitat/humans/robotic exploration package on the nose, and at the most opportune time when your cislunar orbit is headed closest to the desired direction, light that shit off. Boost for 2.5 minutes at 6 g, and discard the 7 Saturn boosters. You're already several times past solar system escape velocity, and your course is assured. Then engage the thermal drive and melt down the reactors and continue to boost at something on the order of 40 billion Newtons per year as you head to the nearest star. Somebody do the math for me. I'm thinking 50 years.
"Oh, but the cost!" you might say. Well look. We don't need the work of all the people we have. It turns out that something like 1 in 4 Americans is all that's required to maintain our standard of living. According the US Bureau of Labor Statistics we have 11 million underemployed people in the US, or $500B/year worth of people who could do be doing something interesting and useful who aren't. And that's just the US, and I think that number is understated 2x. Besides, we'd like to be rid of that nuclear fuel anyway.
I'm not even in the space field and I could figure out how to get people to Tau Ceti in under one human lifespan with resources like that, or robots sooner still. We could do it, right now, with the resources and science that we have. It would be a one-way trip, but we would not lack for volunteers or robots. From one economic point of view it wouldn't cost us one whit more than we're already paying, and instead of being unhappily idle the proletariat would be excitedly engaged in a worthy endeavour. You just have to sell it.
Just because your grandparents couldn't figure out how to do this don't assume that the current generation can't.
It turns out that stars are pretty powerful radio transmitters, and the edge of a stellar system has considerable additional noise. And then there's the cube-square law. Even if they were deliberately transmitting directly at us 12 years ago, it's unlikely we could make out the signal from the noise.
Suns have a lot of light noise too, so we probably wouldn't see a laser transmitter either, unless it were from the very edge of the system.
What we might see if we were looking for it would be the ion emissions of decelerating incoming craft using ion engines, or the thermal signatures of interstellar craft using nuclear thermal propulsion. But by then it might be too late. Or esoteric energy uses like fusion. Or signatures of H-bombs near the periphery of the stellar system.
At 15 degrees Right Ascension, Tau Ceti is a little far off the solar system plane for an exploratory trip just now. Maybe in 50 years.
Cores are physical scientific evidence, or they are not. Exxon can't sprinkle some magic powder on their cores that makes the data come out some way they want - and that would defeat the purpose for them of learning what was truly in the cores. They need that information.
Slashdot Mirror
ISO is a rubber stamp for Microsoft any more. They corrupted the whole organization.
You guys are so far off the Ada mark that you might as well be choking your chicken at the A&P. Would you please learn some little thing about the subject?
BTW: This interaction is part of how I came to claim "symbolset" as my nym.
Do you know how I know you're not an Ada programmer?
No.
Oopsl
Oh cool. Where is the manual? What variation of sweeping, tapping, swiping and clicking at unmarked positions of screen calls it up?
When you connect the mouse there is a cursor. Have you not tried it?
Microsoft bought off all the national bodies of ISO when they ramrodded through their undocumented and impossible to implement "document standard". If ISO knew anything about business processes or standards development they could have prevented that panel-stuffing result. And yet one of the standards they set is business processes for just this situation. I don't trust them any more and I don't think you should either. They are too easily swayed by corporate interests.
Ada's cool in the esoteric nerd sort of way. Like SNOBOL or APL. I shared a girlfriend with one of the Strawman implementors of ADA and knew him moderately well. She was hot (she's probably a great-grandmother now) and he was cool, it was fun, and I'm still fond of ADA. I'm not fond of overloading operators and keywords in an RTOS in the practical sense, but as an artistic exploration of tech potentials I'm all for it as long as you don't make it the OS/language for a drone or something similar. I've never been a fan of garbage collection. It solved some problems I'd rather work around. Sadly Ada went rather overboard in the dynamic re-purposing of symbols, resulting in some unfortunate but predictable side-effects and plain code that had indeterminate use based on context.
If you can't count on a word symbol to mean a quite specific and limited thing, you can't anticipate what your app will do. In my own mind, that was the problem with ADA. By subtexting and repurposing everyting - including the "=" operator and keywords like "if" they created a thing that was useful for mapping and mimicking human intellectual processes but not for doing useful stuff.
Then what is the USB port for?
Putting your first step in the right direction really does make a big difference.
Wait. The tablet doesn't even do dual screens? What is the HDMI port for?
Yeah that's exactly it. Windows 8 is just too great for dumb humans.
That must work great on a tablet interface with no keyboard.
Not where I was going with that. I'm excited to see them making good progress so quickly.
Not taking their time with this one.
That was me. My bad.
Did you try asking?
No, it's a simple inertial thing. The prime jumping-off point for interstellar travel from Earth is L2, as it utilizes the moon as a gravity slingshot. But the target has to be somewhere close to the solar system plane, or it loses the advantages of Earth's orbit being so far out of Sol's gravity well, and Earth's proper motion around Sol as well.
Don't you mean inverse square law?
No, I mean the Square-cube law. In particular that the strength of radio emissions fall off at a ratio of the square of the power to the cube of the distance. Stars are very far and this law destroys the effectiveness of radiological communications over such distances.
You make me post this in every extrasolar planetary thread and it's really annoying.
Voyager 1 is nowhere near current technology. We have ion thrusters now. We have supercomputers now. Hell, your cellphone would have been a supercomputer to the guys who designed that thing. We have water on the moon, in near-earth asteroids, and a limitless supply in Ceres, and we didn't know that then. We have new methods of separating that water into hydrogen and oxygen on orbit efficiently, so it doesn't have to be hoisted out of our gravity well. We have far more understanding about long-term space missions and habitation. Plants grow in space! We didn't know that either. We have commercial rockets that can dock with the space station: an absurd sci-fi fantasy back then. We have robots who can do the work of gathering fuel without too much supervision. We have robots that could survive the kind of acceleration provided by a 1000 km railgun that it would take to put the robots there in a reasonable time, and a place in low-g to put that rail gun and robots to build it. And software to put on the robots that apparently can withstand a 24 year ping time.
In fact, recent learnings about the Voyager Anomaly point to an obvious way to propel interstellar spacecraft: Put a couple dozen 200 MW fission reactors behind some heat/radiation shields and point them in the opposite direction from where you want to go, and let them melt down. The heat provides thrust. At 745 W per HP, that's good for a few thousand horsepower of thrust. Since a Newton is a Horsepower-second, near enough, and the reactors run for many years, that's insane number of Newtons. We actually used to have a project that worked on this theory called Project Orion.
So, for example, get the robots to gather up some water and refine it into LH2/LO2. Slide some of that fuel down to LEO and pick up a commercial hydrox booster and lift it into high orbit and fill it. Repeat until you have seven of them. Now arrange them in a filled hexagon at L2 orbit just beyond the moon, and fill with hydrox. Strap your meltdown-driven spacecraft and habitat/humans/robotic exploration package on the nose, and at the most opportune time when your cislunar orbit is headed closest to the desired direction, light that shit off. Boost for 2.5 minutes at 6 g, and discard the 7 Saturn boosters. You're already several times past solar system escape velocity, and your course is assured. Then engage the thermal drive and melt down the reactors and continue to boost at something on the order of 40 billion Newtons per year as you head to the nearest star. Somebody do the math for me. I'm thinking 50 years.
"Oh, but the cost!" you might say. Well look. We don't need the work of all the people we have. It turns out that something like 1 in 4 Americans is all that's required to maintain our standard of living. According the US Bureau of Labor Statistics we have 11 million underemployed people in the US, or $500B/year worth of people who could do be doing something interesting and useful who aren't. And that's just the US, and I think that number is understated 2x. Besides, we'd like to be rid of that nuclear fuel anyway.
I'm not even in the space field and I could figure out how to get people to Tau Ceti in under one human lifespan with resources like that, or robots sooner still. We could do it, right now, with the resources and science that we have. It would be a one-way trip, but we would not lack for volunteers or robots. From one economic point of view it wouldn't cost us one whit more than we're already paying, and instead of being unhappily idle the proletariat would be excitedly engaged in a worthy endeavour. You just have to sell it.
Just because your grandparents couldn't figure out how to do this don't assume that the current generation can't.
It turns out that stars are pretty powerful radio transmitters, and the edge of a stellar system has considerable additional noise. And then there's the cube-square law. Even if they were deliberately transmitting directly at us 12 years ago, it's unlikely we could make out the signal from the noise.
Suns have a lot of light noise too, so we probably wouldn't see a laser transmitter either, unless it were from the very edge of the system.
What we might see if we were looking for it would be the ion emissions of decelerating incoming craft using ion engines, or the thermal signatures of interstellar craft using nuclear thermal propulsion. But by then it might be too late. Or esoteric energy uses like fusion. Or signatures of H-bombs near the periphery of the stellar system.
At 15 degrees Right Ascension, Tau Ceti is a little far off the solar system plane for an exploratory trip just now. Maybe in 50 years.
This issue didn't get all the attention it deserved. And now it likely won't.
I'm at a loss as to why anybody on Earth would want anything to do with iomega. Maybe you could explain it to me. Like I'm five.
Cores are physical scientific evidence, or they are not. Exxon can't sprinkle some magic powder on their cores that makes the data come out some way they want - and that would defeat the purpose for them of learning what was truly in the cores. They need that information.