You find it work to remember the zero point of the temperature system (whichever one it is) that you use every single day? Seriously? I wouldn't crow about that if it were me.
If anything Fahrenheit is preferable because there are about 35 units between "annoyingly cold" (55) and "annoyingly warm" (90) rather than 20. Units are irrelevant anyway thanks to dimensional analysis - the only real work is calculating the exact prefactor.
The difficulty level being, if you've pumped yourself up to any appreciable fraction of c (as any practical interstellar drive must do), you're going to waste an absolutely stunning amount of energy stopping so that you arrive at the wandering Jupiters, instead of plowing into them like a kamikaze. In fact, it'll basically be equal to your entire fuel load - which you will then replenish in order to repeat the task at the next gas ball.
Far simpler and safer to just boost once, from your origin (which will presumably have externally-powered reaction drives of some form to assist you), then coast the whole way and brake once, at your destination.
even simple logic dictates that it's better to be prepared for an event that never comes (although it's getting harder and harder to credibly believe it's won't) than assume it won't.
Simple logic says that when the opportunity cost of whatever you believe "being prepared" is exceeds the loss due to the event times the probability of it happening you should start questioning if it's worth it. Or put another way, there are an infinite number of things that might happen so there must be some criteria that supresses a divergent response.
Now we can start arguing about the evaluation of three independent nebulous, poorly-defined values (what being prepared is, the probability of disaster and the loss in the event of disaster), horray!
I cannot find anyone above the age of 21 who thinks they have the freedom of speech they were told they had in school. I have trouble finding anyone who's willing to attend a protest for something they believe in and support out of fear of "getting a record" or "getting on a list". They well and truly believe their livelihoods would be threatened by engaging in activities protected by the highest law in the land, activities that our founding fathers and every reputable scholar on the subject of civil liberty and democracy says are essential for the functioning of this society.
As much as I hate to say it, that hits me dead on. And probably a whole lot of people like me who are on track to having secure positions, but don't have them yet. Even as I see what's going on, I commit the classic human mistake of taking a locally "optimal" step that globally is a step towards the failure of society.
Ever wonder why atomic weights vary from place to place?
No, because they don't. The mass of avagadro's number of carbon 12 atoms is the same - 12 grams - everywhere. The weight might differ due to G not being constant across earth but that's not exactly news either. And if atomic weights did depend on where you are in space, there's be all kinds of zomgwtf effects that would've been seen a long time ago.
You know how I know you don't know what their original paper said or how people associated with CERN work? Because you seem to think they took one measurement with uncalibrated instruments and then ran to the presses to publish "zomg, ftl neutrinos!" For crying out loud, do you actually think they would have originally made an announcement like this if there weren't a considerable number of standard deviations between expectation and result?
This recurring trope of "Armchair quarterback posits that people who have spent their entire adult lives studying X made a mistake because they missed some obvious thing the quarterback noticed after 15 seconds of thinking about X" really baffles me. One would think the (ostensibly) smart and educated inhabitants of slashdot would know better.
Richard Feynman said, "Physics is like sex. It may have practical uses but that's not why we do it." Anyone smart enough to acquire an advanced STEM degree could do plenty well making money if all they cared about was making money - we do it because we love learning and creating and designing.
If it could, do you think they'd be wanting to develop exascale computers in the first place? The only tasks that work on distributed systems (distributed meaning random people installing your app on their computer, not distributed memory machines) are pretty much trivially parallel in the first place (since your node-node bandwidth is practically nil, and latency is massive).
I don't see more cores as a win... Parallel programs are always harder to write than serial programs (and in far too many cases effectively impossible). More cores is a crummy consolation prize that we've had to accept since serial speed increases died in about 2003-4. I'll be the first person to preach about how much I love nVidia's s20x0 processor cards (Half a double precision teraflop in a card? Yes please!), but I'd love a quad-core chip running at 40GHz way, way more.
Mainly because CUDA is the only language I've ever encountered where if a programmer told me "I can't get this simple finite difference function to work" I would nod in shared pain instead of thinking they're stupid. I have never encountered a language that was harder to get things right in. Never.
Please read about what the Schutzstaffel did, in real life, to a great many real people, instead of casually throwing around accusations of Naziism or would-be Nazi sympathizing. Equating the FBI and Scotland Yard with the SS is not only an insult to the victims of the SS, it's Peter crying wolf and will prevent warnings from being taken seriously when it really is time to start talking SS/Gestapo. This applies equally to parent and GP.
Once you understand what the Nazis were responsible for, you'll understand that Godwin's Law is a short way of saying "I don't want to waste my time conversing with someone unwilling to see things in perspective without over the top hyperbole."
I think the decision to start Occupy right as winter was moving in might possibly also have had something to do with it fizzling out during winter.
The whole movement has simply presented itself with an insurmountable challenge. As it's put a few posts down, there's an element that's attracted to Occupy like a magnet - communists and anarchists mainly, but also scenester douches who "were totally there, man" - who at once make it impossible to take Occupy seriously because they give the corporate media a bottomless supply of awesome soundbites, but Occupy is unwilling to expel them.
If the whole thing had been conducted in the vein of the civil rights marches, including putting on your Sunday best for the protest and making certain that everyone knew specifically why they were there, it would have been infinitely harder for the media to dismiss. Police brutality only goes so far in making people sympathize with any group.
Given that Google already de-ranks and de-lists sites that do not meet its own ‘quality guidelines’ or otherwise violate its policies, we do not believe that search engines would face significant legal exposure if they were to [pay us protection money]
Now, I'm saying that you should really go and buy some insurance for your business from the insurer we're referring you to. Now, the decision is of course entirely up to you, and I'm not saying anything bad would necessarily happen if you were to refuse. But it would be terrible if, after refusing, something did happen, wouldn't it?
These megalomaniacs aren't even hiding it any more, are they? Though it was really very nice to see what hindsight will probably record as the Internet's first immune response when it bitchslapped sopa/pipa down. Hopefully the first of many. We just have to remember, its power of persuasion will fade through excessive use. The whole internet spawning "stop this evil bill" messages has to be very rare event.
In what universe were the Republicans unable to filibuster the senate?
If you'll recall, the actual 60 vote majority lasted all of a few months until Ted Kennedy fell ill. And it was only 60 by including the "independent" Lieberman. And involving something like bringing angry kids captured in Afghcanistan (or, to hear Faux News tell it, unstoppable terrorist supermen who would walk right through the walls of supermax prison), you can be sure a few Blue Dog DINOs would defect as well... which was exactly what happened.
The real news is that the crimes committed at gitmo haven't stopped, they've just started committing them at Bagram air base instead, where there's way less pesky international observers and stuff.
Someone goes to the other side at the start of the war... meh, they were never on your side in the first place.
Someone goes to the other side in the middle of the war, possibly throwing a crucial battle, "after all we've been through together"? TRAITOR!
Fuck you for thinking you know better than The People
George Carlin said, "Think about how dumb the average American is, then realize half of 'em are dumber than that." Winston Churchill put it, "The best argument against democracy is a 5 minute conversation with the average voter."
Suggesting direct democracy works is the same as suggesting that everything, from the bottom-most kernel driver to the top-level UI, should be written in assembly. Back in reality, no one can actually handle a task like that so we delegate. And thus I am able to write complex simulation programs and visualization interfaces that use 10s of GB of memory without ever having written my own malloc() or having any idea how a video driver works other than that I need to initialize OpenGL and Cuda, and write Hello World without having a clue how data winds its way from printf, down through libraries, into the kernel and eventually to the framebuffer. The world today, and the actions of government needed to keep it in order, are more complex than any computer - and almost no one has the intelligence to understand all of it at once, and none of those who do have the time to act on it.
Legal CYA. In nominal conditions, it's been possible to build a lane-feedback PID steer-er for a long time. But if it did continue to steer you under automatic control, any accident you're involved in someone will try to sue Ford claiming it's their fault their system steered you into an accident. Because true or not Ford has much deeper pockets than your insurance policy...
We're sorry that the average American can't afford a 350hp V8 penis compensator under the hood any more. Complaints can be filed with OPEC to your right.
Slashdot Mirror
You find it work to remember the zero point of the temperature system (whichever one it is) that you use every single day? Seriously? I wouldn't crow about that if it were me.
If anything Fahrenheit is preferable because there are about 35 units between "annoyingly cold" (55) and "annoyingly warm" (90) rather than 20. Units are irrelevant anyway thanks to dimensional analysis - the only real work is calculating the exact prefactor.
The difficulty level being, if you've pumped yourself up to any appreciable fraction of c (as any practical interstellar drive must do), you're going to waste an absolutely stunning amount of energy stopping so that you arrive at the wandering Jupiters, instead of plowing into them like a kamikaze. In fact, it'll basically be equal to your entire fuel load - which you will then replenish in order to repeat the task at the next gas ball.
Far simpler and safer to just boost once, from your origin (which will presumably have externally-powered reaction drives of some form to assist you), then coast the whole way and brake once, at your destination.
80dB of background noise at a classical music concert? I believe you may have confused this with techno concerts or Andrew W.K.. They've all very similar, I can see how the mistake was made.
Now, if we can get one of the latter two to conduct the first, we'd be in Epic territory.
even simple logic dictates that it's better to be prepared for an event that never comes (although it's getting harder and harder to credibly believe it's won't) than assume it won't.
Simple logic says that when the opportunity cost of whatever you believe "being prepared" is exceeds the loss due to the event times the probability of it happening you should start questioning if it's worth it. Or put another way, there are an infinite number of things that might happen so there must be some criteria that supresses a divergent response.
Now we can start arguing about the evaluation of three independent nebulous, poorly-defined values (what being prepared is, the probability of disaster and the loss in the event of disaster), horray!
I cannot find anyone above the age of 21 who thinks they have the freedom of speech they were told they had in school. I have trouble finding anyone who's willing to attend a protest for something they believe in and support out of fear of "getting a record" or "getting on a list". They well and truly believe their livelihoods would be threatened by engaging in activities protected by the highest law in the land, activities that our founding fathers and every reputable scholar on the subject of civil liberty and democracy says are essential for the functioning of this society.
As much as I hate to say it, that hits me dead on. And probably a whole lot of people like me who are on track to having secure positions, but don't have them yet. Even as I see what's going on, I commit the classic human mistake of taking a locally "optimal" step that globally is a step towards the failure of society.
"The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more systems will slip through your fingers."
Ever wonder why atomic weights vary from place to place?
No, because they don't. The mass of avagadro's number of carbon 12 atoms is the same - 12 grams - everywhere. The weight might differ due to G not being constant across earth but that's not exactly news either. And if atomic weights did depend on where you are in space, there's be all kinds of zomgwtf effects that would've been seen a long time ago.
You know how I know you don't know what their original paper said or how people associated with CERN work? Because you seem to think they took one measurement with uncalibrated instruments and then ran to the presses to publish "zomg, ftl neutrinos!" For crying out loud, do you actually think they would have originally made an announcement like this if there weren't a considerable number of standard deviations between expectation and result?
This recurring trope of "Armchair quarterback posits that people who have spent their entire adult lives studying X made a mistake because they missed some obvious thing the quarterback noticed after 15 seconds of thinking about X" really baffles me. One would think the (ostensibly) smart and educated inhabitants of slashdot would know better.
Richard Feynman said, "Physics is like sex. It may have practical uses but that's not why we do it." Anyone smart enough to acquire an advanced STEM degree could do plenty well making money if all they cared about was making money - we do it because we love learning and creating and designing.
If it could, do you think they'd be wanting to develop exascale computers in the first place? The only tasks that work on distributed systems (distributed meaning random people installing your app on their computer, not distributed memory machines) are pretty much trivially parallel in the first place (since your node-node bandwidth is practically nil, and latency is massive).
You seem to be rather a bit bitter at something as trivial as not having a low registration number on a web forum.
I don't see more cores as a win... Parallel programs are always harder to write than serial programs (and in far too many cases effectively impossible). More cores is a crummy consolation prize that we've had to accept since serial speed increases died in about 2003-4. I'll be the first person to preach about how much I love nVidia's s20x0 processor cards (Half a double precision teraflop in a card? Yes please!), but I'd love a quad-core chip running at 40GHz way, way more.
Mainly because CUDA is the only language I've ever encountered where if a programmer told me "I can't get this simple finite difference function to work" I would nod in shared pain instead of thinking they're stupid. I have never encountered a language that was harder to get things right in. Never.
You think that was the greatest military blunder of all time? Seriously?
Are people really this blind to history?
You like hyperbole, eh?
Please read about what the Schutzstaffel did, in real life, to a great many real people, instead of casually throwing around accusations of Naziism or would-be Nazi sympathizing. Equating the FBI and Scotland Yard with the SS is not only an insult to the victims of the SS, it's Peter crying wolf and will prevent warnings from being taken seriously when it really is time to start talking SS/Gestapo. This applies equally to parent and GP.
Once you understand what the Nazis were responsible for, you'll understand that Godwin's Law is a short way of saying "I don't want to waste my time conversing with someone unwilling to see things in perspective without over the top hyperbole."
I think the decision to start Occupy right as winter was moving in might possibly also have had something to do with it fizzling out during winter.
The whole movement has simply presented itself with an insurmountable challenge. As it's put a few posts down, there's an element that's attracted to Occupy like a magnet - communists and anarchists mainly, but also scenester douches who "were totally there, man" - who at once make it impossible to take Occupy seriously because they give the corporate media a bottomless supply of awesome soundbites, but Occupy is unwilling to expel them.
If the whole thing had been conducted in the vein of the civil rights marches, including putting on your Sunday best for the protest and making certain that everyone knew specifically why they were there, it would have been infinitely harder for the media to dismiss. Police brutality only goes so far in making people sympathize with any group.
Now, I'm saying that you should really go and buy some insurance for your business from the insurer we're referring you to. Now, the decision is of course entirely up to you, and I'm not saying anything bad would necessarily happen if you were to refuse. But it would be terrible if, after refusing, something did happen, wouldn't it?
These megalomaniacs aren't even hiding it any more, are they? Though it was really very nice to see what hindsight will probably record as the Internet's first immune response when it bitchslapped sopa/pipa down. Hopefully the first of many. We just have to remember, its power of persuasion will fade through excessive use. The whole internet spawning "stop this evil bill" messages has to be very rare event.
But the idiots the Murdoch-owned WSJ sets out to manipulate wouldn't read or be capable of understanding a research whitepaper.
Now, emotional button-pressing and pushing them damned scientists as the evil out group? That they understand.
In what universe were the Republicans unable to filibuster the senate?
If you'll recall, the actual 60 vote majority lasted all of a few months until Ted Kennedy fell ill. And it was only 60 by including the "independent" Lieberman. And involving something like bringing angry kids captured in Afghcanistan (or, to hear Faux News tell it, unstoppable terrorist supermen who would walk right through the walls of supermax prison), you can be sure a few Blue Dog DINOs would defect as well... which was exactly what happened.
The real news is that the crimes committed at gitmo haven't stopped, they've just started committing them at Bagram air base instead, where there's way less pesky international observers and stuff.
Someone goes to the other side at the start of the war... meh, they were never on your side in the first place.
Someone goes to the other side in the middle of the war, possibly throwing a crucial battle, "after all we've been through together"? TRAITOR!
That's the basic reaction at play here.
George Carlin said, "Think about how dumb the average American is, then realize half of 'em are dumber than that." Winston Churchill put it, "The best argument against democracy is a 5 minute conversation with the average voter."
Suggesting direct democracy works is the same as suggesting that everything, from the bottom-most kernel driver to the top-level UI, should be written in assembly. Back in reality, no one can actually handle a task like that so we delegate. And thus I am able to write complex simulation programs and visualization interfaces that use 10s of GB of memory without ever having written my own malloc() or having any idea how a video driver works other than that I need to initialize OpenGL and Cuda, and write Hello World without having a clue how data winds its way from printf, down through libraries, into the kernel and eventually to the framebuffer. The world today, and the actions of government needed to keep it in order, are more complex than any computer - and almost no one has the intelligence to understand all of it at once, and none of those who do have the time to act on it.
Don't post it on public fora.
If I go and post a manifesto in public declaring my intent to commit some crime, the cops are perfectly within their rights to read it.
If the point went any further over your head it would enter low-earth orbit.
When I quote the first post from last night's thread on PIPA:
Fuck you. We still don't want it.
Legal CYA. In nominal conditions, it's been possible to build a lane-feedback PID steer-er for a long time. But if it did continue to steer you under automatic control, any accident you're involved in someone will try to sue Ford claiming it's their fault their system steered you into an accident. Because true or not Ford has much deeper pockets than your insurance policy...
We're sorry that the average American can't afford a 350hp V8 penis compensator under the hood any more. Complaints can be filed with OPEC to your right.