Caesium atoms are quite cheap, especially when you need several of them. They are just looking forward to a future scenario where they might need to invest in 10 or even 15 atoms.
I have that quite often: I need to find some information for my work, and that same day slashdot has an article about it. Sometimes it is almost as if Cowboy Neal himself had a camera in my office (he is probably sharing it with Scott Adams;-) ).
...hey, it makes a great excuse to read/. during work!
By your argumentation, nothing we do can be called unnatural. That makes the distinction between natural and unnatural useless.
I'd like to argue that our sense of morality separates us from nature. When our actions disturb the natural order, that is unnatural. The natural order is for those great apes to live in a forest somewhere in Afrika. If they are killed by a disease or predator, that's natural and I can accept it. But wiping them out to satisfy our never-ending hunger for more land and more resources, or worse, for superstitious beliefs, is unnatural and wrong.
In space, software may malfunction because of a cosmic ray hitting a CPU or bit in memory in just the wrong location and flipping a bit. This is why there are usually three flight computers in a spacecraft: to detect and recover from these transient errors.
I fail to see why a troll like you got modded up so far, but ok...
Launching things into space is not relatively easy and not pretty ho-hum. In fact, the one remaining super power in this world does not even have the capability to launch people into space anymore! (the fact that efforts are under way to restore shuttle services does not change the current state of affairs)
Energy costs _are_ a major factor, not just for the launch but throughout the entire space industry. Since launching is hideously expensive (between $50 million and $500 million depending on your launch vehicle), space hardware must be utterly perfect, and made to last more or less forever, before it leaves the ground. If you could drop launch costs to, say, $5 million, you could afford to build your spacecraft to lower standards. If one were to fail in orbit, no big deal - just send up another. This alone represents a major cost savings that is not usually taken into account by space elevator economics. Even though other cost factors remain (particularly, that of running your spaceport) the overal effect would be a significant lowering of cost.
The cost of building a space elevator is irrelevant. It is the ultimate phallic symbol, so price doesn't matter. Moreover, relative cost per launch lowers each time you raise something into orbit, ultimately falling to zero.
Cutting the price by 10x will, as you say, not mean 10x more stuff is going up. It will be more like 100x more stuff, since more groups will be able to afford a launch. Instead of building a small 3-person capsule that launches on a single rocket, we could assemble huge interplanetary spacecraft. They would be far larger and safer (because of heavier shielding, greater redundancies, etc.) than what we could launch today. We could also afford to send up garbage-collection craft that have no other purpose than clean up earth orbit, thereby reducing clutter.
Finally, your comment about problem solving on earth BEFORE we are allowed into space is disgusting. It comes up every time space is discussed, and I always find myself wondering "when, then?" When will be allowed of this planet? Don't you realize that most earthly problems are man-made, fabricated to serve a political purpose? What makes you think engineers should be working on a solution to them? Moreover, do you have any idea how much money goes into space exploration, compared to say the military budget, or the healthcare budget, or the education budget?
That, and good naming of variables / functions / classes. To clear up any possible confusion: that means that the name has some bearing on what the thing in question is doing for you...
Recently I had the misfortune to wade through a few hundred kilobytes of Java that was written by someone who thought he should 'abstract' everything as much as was humanly possible. Sounds good, right? Well... It turns you can do a lot of harm that way, too. I don't think he had a single function in there that _wasn't_ called something like SetProperty(), GetValue(), DoFunction(), etc. There was absolutely no way to guess what it was doing based on the name of the functions. Naming of classes and variables wasn't much better. After looking at it for a couple of hours I don't think I could have guessed what it was trying to do if I hadn't already known that beforehand.
So, next time you are writing software, feel free to get in touch with reality and name stuff after what it is supposed to be doing. Nice long names please, no abbreviations unless you go over 30 or 40 characters. Down with CmtPmt2Db(), down with SCUPD(), and down with GetPropertyValueInterfaceCaller()!
Because, be honest: those mean nothing, while CommitPaymentToDatabase(), ScreenUpdate(), and GetXLocation(), have intuitive meanings we all understand...
Ha, that's nothing. Long ago I used to work for a company that thought it was a good idea to NEVER reuse code because then you would reuse all the bugs as well. OTOH, they reasoned, if you wrote it from scratch you wouldn't be copying old bugs, thus this was a safer thing to do.
I'll leave the results as an exercise for the reader...
Emergent gameplay is defined as when rather than actions being scripted, the level of interaction with the environment is sufficient to allow the player options.
I was under the impression that "emergent" gameplay is what you get when the tools you have are sufficiently generic to allow solutions the designers never even considered. You make it sound like if you have three pre-designed solutions, that would be emergent gameplay, but I don't think that is the case.
A great example of emergent gameplay is the rocketjump. It wasn't intended to work that way, but people were using it to jump to places they weren't supposed to reach. Similarly, the mines you can use in both Half Life and Deus Ex to climb walls you aren't supposed to climb is a nice example.
I hope that in the future, physics engines will provide a great deal more emergent gameplay than we see today, if only because the designers will fail to see all the possibilities;-)
Yeah, except that in Doom 3 you already know what happened so it doesn't work _at all_. Not to mention the fact that all the audiologs are more or less the same: "This is the [bored sigh] audio log of dr. [whatever]... The guys in the delta complex are ticking me off [exasperated voice] again. Something weird happened, and I wonder if it is related to them... [indifferent voice] Well, I hope everything will be alright. The code to my locker has been changed, and the new code is 1, 2, 3."
In System Shock 2 it took a long time before the crew was even aware of any problem, and once they were they had enough time to organize resistance (unlike Doom 3 where the entire thing is over in a few minutes, basically the time it takes you to walk from the comm. center to marine HQ). As a result you find many, varied logs, some from before the problems start, some from people getting suspicious, and some from those who actively fight back.
While it is rather hard to actually identify crew members in SS2, I often found myself wondering if the mutilated corpse in front of me was in fact that of one of the people who's logs I had been reading. The notion that I could still hear their voices while they were no longer around to speak added a poignant touch to the game.
I loved that game, but I haven't been able to make it work on my current machine. No matter what patches I apply or how I install it, it always crashes seconds into the game.
Besides, technology has moved on. Now, imagine the Doom 3 engine used to run the System Shock 2 game. Wouldn't that be yummy?
(E) delivering advertisements that a user of the computer cannot close without turning off the computer or closing all sessions of the Internet browser for the computer.
So I guess that settles it for ad-supported Opera then...
(8) Removing, disabling, or rendering inoperative a security, anti-spyware, or anti-virus technology installed on the computer.
I guess we will have to hand in our shift-keys as well.
I don't think this is about reading and avoiding anymore - this type of broad patents make it effectively impossible to do _any_ useful work without the permission of Kodak (or Microsoft, IBM, Sun,...).
Are we to return to the dark ages then, with feudal lords allowing us to work on specific patches of land, slaves in all but name? Because that is where we will end up if this continues.
Frankly, the notion that I am not allowed to think of something and then express that thought as a program is both painful and idiotic. It makes me wonder why software patents are possible in the USA, since they seem to contradict the right to free speech. It also makes me understand what Stallman is trying to tell us, and how important he really is.
And not to forget: how important it is that software patents are stopped in Europe.
How about AmigaOS (released in 1985)? If you called a function in the dos.library, it would (based on the type of the device referenced) defer that function to a different filesystem handler and/or device. Each filesystem and each device was a unique program, performing functions for the client applications.
For a patent to apply to a case like this, must all the claims match? Or could any one claim in fact be ground for a lawsuit?
Secondly, these patents refer to older, discounted patents (such as 07/088,622). I've tried entering those numbers for a patent search and came up blank - I'm guessing I'm doing it wrong somehow, but I don't know how to do any better. Do you know what I'm doing wrong? The reason I'm asking is to see how much the patents changed as a result of continuation.
And so does Peter Hamilton's "Night's dawn" trilogy, although it is only a minor element of the overal story there. Those humans still living on Earth (quite a few, at 43 billion(?)) live under giant domes that keep out the devastating "armada storms". The only thing that still grows outside is a particularly tough breed of grass.
His "Greg Mandel" series of books are set in the same universe, at an earlier time. The hero of those books grows oranges in Great Brittain, also made possible through global warming...
I think it is premature to suspect the weather module, it might just as well be the smiting module. If that is true it would be operating according to spec. Anyway, let's just wait and gather some more data first. If mt. Helen blows and wipes out a significant part of the landscape, the Big Earthquake hits and drops California into the ocean, and half a dozen further hurricanes hit Florida, all this year, I'm inclined to think it wasn't weather.cpp...
Apart from tourism and general property damage, there is something else I'm curious about: how does this affect NASA and its ability to launch space shuttles?
Since this is a serious question I might as well make the obvious joke myself: "not at all. They cannot launch space shuttles right now and that won't change because of the storms."
Having gotten that out of the way, does someone know a real answer?
I have watched the news and I sympathize from my rather safer location in the world. However, there is something I just don't understand: why do americans build their houses of wood? Why not use concrete or something else that can actually withstand hurricanes?
BTW, you don't suppose this will change the general opinion about the Kyoto protocols do you? Now that pollution can be linked to bad weather, and bad weather has a price tag worth billions of dollars, maybe there is some incentive to actually tackle the problem...
Slashdot Mirror
Caesium atoms are quite cheap, especially when you need several of them. They are just looking forward to a future scenario where they might need to invest in 10 or even 15 atoms.
I'd like to argue that our sense of morality separates us from nature. When our actions disturb the natural order, that is unnatural. The natural order is for those great apes to live in a forest somewhere in Afrika. If they are killed by a disease or predator, that's natural and I can accept it. But wiping them out to satisfy our never-ending hunger for more land and more resources, or worse, for superstitious beliefs, is unnatural and wrong.
In space, software may malfunction because of a cosmic ray hitting a CPU or bit in memory in just the wrong location and flipping a bit. This is why there are usually three flight computers in a spacecraft: to detect and recover from these transient errors.
...or maybe it is, but at least the mother of the victim has stated in public that the murderer gave the game to her son a few days before his death.
You could always put a Smart in the back of your SUV as a backup...
Launching things into space is not relatively easy and not pretty ho-hum. In fact, the one remaining super power in this world does not even have the capability to launch people into space anymore! (the fact that efforts are under way to restore shuttle services does not change the current state of affairs)
Energy costs _are_ a major factor, not just for the launch but throughout the entire space industry. Since launching is hideously expensive (between $50 million and $500 million depending on your launch vehicle), space hardware must be utterly perfect, and made to last more or less forever, before it leaves the ground. If you could drop launch costs to, say, $5 million, you could afford to build your spacecraft to lower standards. If one were to fail in orbit, no big deal - just send up another. This alone represents a major cost savings that is not usually taken into account by space elevator economics. Even though other cost factors remain (particularly, that of running your spaceport) the overal effect would be a significant lowering of cost.
The cost of building a space elevator is irrelevant. It is the ultimate phallic symbol, so price doesn't matter. Moreover, relative cost per launch lowers each time you raise something into orbit, ultimately falling to zero.
Cutting the price by 10x will, as you say, not mean 10x more stuff is going up. It will be more like 100x more stuff, since more groups will be able to afford a launch. Instead of building a small 3-person capsule that launches on a single rocket, we could assemble huge interplanetary spacecraft. They would be far larger and safer (because of heavier shielding, greater redundancies, etc.) than what we could launch today. We could also afford to send up garbage-collection craft that have no other purpose than clean up earth orbit, thereby reducing clutter.
Finally, your comment about problem solving on earth BEFORE we are allowed into space is disgusting. It comes up every time space is discussed, and I always find myself wondering "when, then?" When will be allowed of this planet? Don't you realize that most earthly problems are man-made, fabricated to serve a political purpose? What makes you think engineers should be working on a solution to them? Moreover, do you have any idea how much money goes into space exploration, compared to say the military budget, or the healthcare budget, or the education budget?
I've tried googling for it, but no luck. Any idea you remember what forum it was on?
Man, if only there were unit tests for slashdot postings... Ah, wait, we have those (lameness filter!) and they don't help at all!
Recently I had the misfortune to wade through a few hundred kilobytes of Java that was written by someone who thought he should 'abstract' everything as much as was humanly possible. Sounds good, right? Well... It turns you can do a lot of harm that way, too. I don't think he had a single function in there that _wasn't_ called something like SetProperty(), GetValue(), DoFunction(), etc. There was absolutely no way to guess what it was doing based on the name of the functions. Naming of classes and variables wasn't much better. After looking at it for a couple of hours I don't think I could have guessed what it was trying to do if I hadn't already known that beforehand.
So, next time you are writing software, feel free to get in touch with reality and name stuff after what it is supposed to be doing. Nice long names please, no abbreviations unless you go over 30 or 40 characters. Down with CmtPmt2Db(), down with SCUPD(), and down with GetPropertyValueInterfaceCaller()!
Because, be honest: those mean nothing, while CommitPaymentToDatabase(), ScreenUpdate(), and GetXLocation(), have intuitive meanings we all understand...
I'll leave the results as an exercise for the reader...
How can you challenge a perfect, immortal being like me, puny hacker?
Yeah, that's it in a nutshell ;-)
Anyway, I'll give it a try. Thanks for the link!
I was under the impression that "emergent" gameplay is what you get when the tools you have are sufficiently generic to allow solutions the designers never even considered. You make it sound like if you have three pre-designed solutions, that would be emergent gameplay, but I don't think that is the case.
A great example of emergent gameplay is the rocketjump. It wasn't intended to work that way, but people were using it to jump to places they weren't supposed to reach. Similarly, the mines you can use in both Half Life and Deus Ex to climb walls you aren't supposed to climb is a nice example.
I hope that in the future, physics engines will provide a great deal more emergent gameplay than we see today, if only because the designers will fail to see all the possibilities ;-)
In System Shock 2 it took a long time before the crew was even aware of any problem, and once they were they had enough time to organize resistance (unlike Doom 3 where the entire thing is over in a few minutes, basically the time it takes you to walk from the comm. center to marine HQ). As a result you find many, varied logs, some from before the problems start, some from people getting suspicious, and some from those who actively fight back.
While it is rather hard to actually identify crew members in SS2, I often found myself wondering if the mutilated corpse in front of me was in fact that of one of the people who's logs I had been reading. The notion that I could still hear their voices while they were no longer around to speak added a poignant touch to the game.
Besides, technology has moved on. Now, imagine the Doom 3 engine used to run the System Shock 2 game. Wouldn't that be yummy?
So I guess that settles it for ad-supported Opera then...
(8) Removing, disabling, or rendering inoperative a security, anti-spyware, or anti-virus technology installed on the computer.
I guess we will have to hand in our shift-keys as well.
It scares me to think what else might be in your bookmarks at home...
Are we to return to the dark ages then, with feudal lords allowing us to work on specific patches of land, slaves in all but name? Because that is where we will end up if this continues.
Frankly, the notion that I am not allowed to think of something and then express that thought as a program is both painful and idiotic. It makes me wonder why software patents are possible in the USA, since they seem to contradict the right to free speech. It also makes me understand what Stallman is trying to tell us, and how important he really is.
And not to forget: how important it is that software patents are stopped in Europe.
How about AmigaOS (released in 1985)? If you called a function in the dos.library, it would (based on the type of the device referenced) defer that function to a different filesystem handler and/or device. Each filesystem and each device was a unique program, performing functions for the client applications.
For a patent to apply to a case like this, must all the claims match? Or could any one claim in fact be ground for a lawsuit?
Secondly, these patents refer to older, discounted patents (such as 07/088,622). I've tried entering those numbers for a patent search and came up blank - I'm guessing I'm doing it wrong somehow, but I don't know how to do any better. Do you know what I'm doing wrong? The reason I'm asking is to see how much the patents changed as a result of continuation.
Either that, or they buy the patents and kill everybody else. Guess what is more attractive to them?
His "Greg Mandel" series of books are set in the same universe, at an earlier time. The hero of those books grows oranges in Great Brittain, also made possible through global warming...
Since this is a serious question I might as well make the obvious joke myself: "not at all. They cannot launch space shuttles right now and that won't change because of the storms."
Having gotten that out of the way, does someone know a real answer?
BTW, you don't suppose this will change the general opinion about the Kyoto protocols do you? Now that pollution can be linked to bad weather, and bad weather has a price tag worth billions of dollars, maybe there is some incentive to actually tackle the problem...