So, in your estimation, an orbital solar collector with microwave power transmission back to the ground is a waste of time, unless it has a human operator?
No, I think he's saying that an orbital solar collector with microwave power transmission back to the ground is waste of time, if it isn't used to ultimately advance humans getting off this single rock... And that makes some sense too, as with enough bad luck, the Earth could turn into a ball of molten lava with rock vapour atmosphere at a rather short notice, for instance by being hit head-on with a large comet.
Not that it's going to last much longer. Then again we still have more bombs.
For a while maybe, but but it's worth remembering, one of the major factors of downfall of Soviet Union was trying to have more bombs than they could afford. Power is same as money, they basically mean the same thing in modern world, so losing one implies losing the other, and that in turn means losing the "more bombs" part too, as maintaining them in operational condition is expensive. Just think how large part of current Russian bomb stockpile is in operational condition... It's unknown (probably even to themselves), but it's sure to be a lot less than what they want everybody to believe.
Unfortunately, not enough voters in California got off their asses to legalize marihuana there (I know someone like that--wholeheartedly thinks marihuana should be legal, but couldn't get his ass to the polling station to vote
I think it's worth a few moments to think about above text... He and others who'd want that, why didn't they manage to get their asses to the polling station, while those who don't want that managed to vote?
Oh c'mon.. too simple. The guy pulling the trigger is the killer. There is nobody else.
Now, with voice activated machines. A voice can trigger a machine reliably. A machine can't choose to refuse. That's the key. So yeah, the voice is the trigger. But when you tell a person, it's another thing altogether. So let's make it easy. The last person in the chain is the guilty one..
Interesting point of view, I think I can understand it, but I disagree with it. Humans are partially a bit like machines, following orders, peer pressure etc. Giving order to shoot to a firing squad is as certain a decision to kill somebody, as giving the order to a voice-activated gun mechanism. It becomes apparent, if the one giving the order is blindfolded and doesn't know what will carry out the order. "I gave the order and he was shot to death by that order, but I don't know if it was human or robot pulling the trigger, so I may or may not be guilty of killing him" doesn't fly with me.
The person I responded to doesn't understand that real action is required to kill somebody. Words by themselves can do nothing. Somebody has to act. This point goes over everybody's head (including the moderators) every single time I try to bring this up. The man acquired nothing that wasn't given to him. He gained power through appeasement long before any military action was needed.
But with killing, there's always a line that needs to be drawn. Even moment of death isn't clearly defined, and is being stretched by advances in medicine. Assuming a situation where a bullet fired by a gun immediately results in a death of a human it hits: Does a person kill when he pulls a trigger of gun? Does a person kill when he utters a word, which triggers a voice-activated gun (technically trivial to rig even a normal gun to do this). Does a person kill when he utters a word, which "triggers" a firing squad? Does a person kill when he utters a word, which "triggers" a firing squad execution sentence to be carried out? What about sentencing somebody to be killed by a firing squad, in a situation where sentence is very likely to get carried out?
Neural networks without an understanding of calculus or linear algebra?
Should we start reading Shakespeare before we learn the alphabet?
Or learn multiplication before addition?
Wrong comparisons. Better would be, should we start reading Shakespeare before we have at least two years of literacy studies under our belt, or should we learn multiplication before getting a firm grasp on number theory?
Yeah? How does that work? How does a word kill a person if it can't pick up a gun and pull the trigger? How does a word get up in the morning, take a shit and a shower, and put on its uniform? What size boot does a word wear?
Depending on which you prefer, you can try reading here or here. First one is relevant to a person mentioned by GP, but second is more geeky.
What with all that darkness you guys deal with, I can't figure out why Scandinavian women evolved into such exquisite creatures. What does it matter, in the dark?
Now you forget the other half of the year. Imagine watching a woman in perpetual light for months, not a moment of darkness to spare your eyes... And the other half of the year doesn't give less attractive looking people any advantage, it just makes thing equal for half of the time.
At least in the developed countries, we should move to constantly adjusting time, anchored either at sunrise (always fixed amount of daylight in the morning) or at sunset (fixed amount of daylight after work). So probably, to stay in familiar time ranges, either sunrise would be at 06:00 every morning, or sunset would be at 18:00 every evening. Of course then we'd need time areas instead of time zones, for example each state being it's own time area in the US, and time in that zone set by some suitable point in each area.
Or it wouldn't have to be anchored exatly at sunrise or sunset either, but that could drift too. The point is, there would not be a large change two times a year, which both maximizes the damage and reduces the advantages as it still isn't optimal for large part of the year and for different locations at different latitudes.
So each clock would be set to UTC, and would calculate the correct local time to show for it's set time area. Clocks would probably show time both in local time and in UTC, as for example TV schedules would need be in UTC except for very local channels. Technology is approaching point where there is no real need to have synchronized clocks accross large areas: businesses are largely inter-time zone already so exact local time in any give time zone doesn't mean much, and we're moving from broadcast media to time-shifted and on-demand delivery of media content.
And then there would be extra coolness to mechanical clocks able to show correct local time for any given time zone, as I believe the mechanism would need to be quite complex, possibly out of scope of building such a thing out of Legos, even:-)
Well the interesting comment in that article is the one from AMD.
'The actual innovation in graphics has definitely been driven by Microsoft in the last ten years or so,' explained AMD's GPU worldwide developer relations manager, Richard Huddy.
One would imagine that a company that develop and make GPU accelerators would be the innovator in the field but apparently AMD is fine with being in Microsoft shadow.
Modern graphics hardware is nothing without a library and API to it. At least for gaming purposes (and excluding consoles, though they really aren't cutting edge by the time they're in the shops anyway), Microsoft controls what programmers can ask hardware to do for them, and therefore ultimately they control what hardware can be designed to do.
Sorry, this is slashdot... that's as far as we know. Maybe someone from the Outside can chime in on what happens when a man and woman get together??
Hopefully it's sweet like ninjas! (I love ninjas)
Oh, I'm pretty sure that the hard disk of your average basement dweller has a decent selection of HD-quality video material about what happens when men and women get together in various combinations...
But they won't work when the moon is below the horizon - then you're looking at a 12-hour dead time.The moon makes a terrible data warehouse if you want to access your stuff in anything like real time on a consistent basis.
Well, we could build some kind of worldwide network here on Earth, so as long as any side of Earth is pointing towards Moon, we could pipe the data over this earthly network.
No, only thing stopping off-site backup on the Moon is that it'd be utterly stupid: exorbitant cost for no major benefit compared to eg. off-site backup to other continent. I mean, any event that is likely to obliterate two continents is also likely to affect the Moon, so it's not really safe!
Now, off-site backup in a solid iron meteorite in a stable, lonely, safe orbit as far out as possible that still gets enough solar radiation to have power from it... But that's useful only for data that would need to survive the red giant phase of Sun, and would need to store data by engraving or some other method that won't get corrupted in a while.
So am I, in C '==' is used to compare two different objects it does not actually define either of them, '=' on the other hand does.
Nitpick: '=' in C is assignment, not definition. And I don't know how assignment of any kind makes any sense in above context, while saying "chamber filled with debris equals no chamber at all" is perfectly valid English turn of phrase, I think.
As for the GPP, I agree. Every time they find something like this, there's always the "So Earth was seeded by these" speculation. It seems that such materials are rather common in our solar system, both here on Earth, on other planets, and on meteors and asteroids. If such organic molecules can form with relative ease in so many other places in the solar system, I see no reason why they couldn't have formed on Earth as well as it went through it's own geological evolution. Especially when geological processes for forming many complex organic chemicals abiotically have been documented. No doubt that stuff falling from the sky could contribute to organic materials on Earth, but I see no reason to believe that they are a major contribution.
Well, different molecules require different environments to form, and I think it's a least likely, that some necessary molecules could only be formed outside Earth. If they didn't rain on Earth with meteorites, there might not have been life, because critical building blocks would have been missing.
Speculation in my part of course,and in any case it's hard to know which molecules these were, and certainly nothing "astromystical" about it.
It's kind of like, WSJ reporting that government is trying to take direct control of all stock trading, and then some reader asking "Who gives a rat's ass."
No, bible tracks. It's tank tracks made out of Bibles and barbed wire. As a tank with Bible tracks drives over an unbeliever demonstrator, there's a chance that they'll repent and be saved, when they can read the Bible while lying crushed in the ground and bleeding to death.
You'd better get your facts straight before you correct spelling errors of other people!
Wow. He just described Java and its ecosystem... and wasn't Qt and it's C++ followers 100% against Java back in the day (before JambaQt). Wouldn't it be easier to just fix AWT/Swing/SWT?
Maybe he doesn't like Java, but Likes Qt C++? I know I do.
Anyway, with Oracle thing, there's more reason to be suspicious about Java than just not liking it personally. Also, he's not "fixing" anything, he's adding support for something which he already considers sufficiently unbroken. Quite understandable really, because he has power to do that, it's doable by one person (as demonstrated here), while chaning existing toolkits owned and maintained by various organizations... probably not realistic without a Death Star on orbit to use as negotiation tool to get changes to happen.
I really want to be able to use Remote X On my Android phone, that is the one feature I really want that I do not currently have. Hopefully this will allow me to do that sometime in the future.
Maybe in a roundabout way, making it easier to port a "virtual" X server to Android. But Qt itself has nothing to do with X (except on Linux platforms, which Android isn't for this purpose).
Mobile development is slowly but surely standardizing on html + css + javascript for the presentation layer. Qt on Android is about as relevant as a C64 emulator on Android - a cool hobby project for a few enthusiasts.
It'll be at least... 3 years before phones have browsers capable of displaying proper HTML apps. Probably more, as even HTML itself isn't quite ready yet, just in the "technology preview" state. So your statement is kind of premature, until then many apps just can't be made with "web technologies".
Yes. Although, the closest body part would be the male nipple, not the penis. There's nothing naturally arousing about the female breast other than our culturally conditioned worship of it. It doesn't even bring sex to mind until you learn to equate the two.
Oh, there most certainly is something naturally arousing, as breasts are one big factor subconciously used by males to evaluate females ability to successfully raise children (not the only or the biggest factor, but one of the major ones). And even if modern sex doesn't often have anything to do with having offspring, sex drive is still mostly about that (not only about that, it's also about bonding inside the group a bit).
Multiple healthy offspring -> nutrition -> breast milk -> breasts <- producing offsping <- sex <- arousal <- visual inspection of potential mate
Windows is "open" and Mac OS is proprietary? What have you been smoking?
I think I can legally run Windows on virtual machine under MacOS. I don't think I can legally run MacOS on virtual machine under Windows. Your definition of "open" must be pretty funny if it ignores a detail like this.
I was considering qt, now I'm unsure. With MS around to fuck it up, we'll probably have qt.net in the future.
As long as you're not planning on using it with a phone, go for it. It's LGPL. If MSNokia starts to screw around with it, there'll be fork, so I don't see it going stale, and even if it does, it won't be outdated in a few years yet.
Slashdot Mirror
So, in your estimation, an orbital solar collector with microwave power transmission back to the ground is a waste of time, unless it has a human operator?
No, I think he's saying that an orbital solar collector with microwave power transmission back to the ground is waste of time, if it isn't used to ultimately advance humans getting off this single rock... And that makes some sense too, as with enough bad luck, the Earth could turn into a ball of molten lava with rock vapour atmosphere at a rather short notice, for instance by being hit head-on with a large comet.
Not that it's going to last much longer. Then again we still have more bombs.
For a while maybe, but but it's worth remembering, one of the major factors of downfall of Soviet Union was trying to have more bombs than they could afford. Power is same as money, they basically mean the same thing in modern world, so losing one implies losing the other, and that in turn means losing the "more bombs" part too, as maintaining them in operational condition is expensive. Just think how large part of current Russian bomb stockpile is in operational condition... It's unknown (probably even to themselves), but it's sure to be a lot less than what they want everybody to believe.
Unfortunately, not enough voters in California got off their asses to legalize marihuana there (I know someone like that--wholeheartedly thinks marihuana should be legal, but couldn't get his ass to the polling station to vote
I think it's worth a few moments to think about above text... He and others who'd want that, why didn't they manage to get their asses to the polling station, while those who don't want that managed to vote?
Oh c'mon.. too simple. The guy pulling the trigger is the killer. There is nobody else.
Now, with voice activated machines. A voice can trigger a machine reliably. A machine can't choose to refuse. That's the key. So yeah, the voice is the trigger. But when you tell a person, it's another thing altogether. So let's make it easy. The last person in the chain is the guilty one..
Interesting point of view, I think I can understand it, but I disagree with it. Humans are partially a bit like machines, following orders, peer pressure etc. Giving order to shoot to a firing squad is as certain a decision to kill somebody, as giving the order to a voice-activated gun mechanism. It becomes apparent, if the one giving the order is blindfolded and doesn't know what will carry out the order. "I gave the order and he was shot to death by that order, but I don't know if it was human or robot pulling the trigger, so I may or may not be guilty of killing him" doesn't fly with me.
The person I responded to doesn't understand that real action is required to kill somebody. Words by themselves can do nothing. Somebody has to act. This point goes over everybody's head (including the moderators) every single time I try to bring this up. The man acquired nothing that wasn't given to him. He gained power through appeasement long before any military action was needed.
But with killing, there's always a line that needs to be drawn. Even moment of death isn't clearly defined, and is being stretched by advances in medicine. Assuming a situation where a bullet fired by a gun immediately results in a death of a human it hits: Does a person kill when he pulls a trigger of gun? Does a person kill when he utters a word, which triggers a voice-activated gun (technically trivial to rig even a normal gun to do this). Does a person kill when he utters a word, which "triggers" a firing squad? Does a person kill when he utters a word, which "triggers" a firing squad execution sentence to be carried out? What about sentencing somebody to be killed by a firing squad, in a situation where sentence is very likely to get carried out?
Where you draw the line?
Neural networks without an understanding of calculus or linear algebra?
Should we start reading Shakespeare before we learn the alphabet?
Or learn multiplication before addition?
Wrong comparisons. Better would be, should we start reading Shakespeare before we have at least two years of literacy studies under our belt, or should we learn multiplication before getting a firm grasp on number theory?
Yeah? How does that work? How does a word kill a person if it can't pick up a gun and pull the trigger? How does a word get up in the morning, take a shit and a shower, and put on its uniform? What size boot does a word wear?
Depending on which you prefer, you can try reading here or here. First one is relevant to a person mentioned by GP, but second is more geeky.
What with all that darkness you guys deal with, I can't figure out why Scandinavian women evolved into such exquisite creatures. What does it matter, in the dark?
Now you forget the other half of the year. Imagine watching a woman in perpetual light for months, not a moment of darkness to spare your eyes... And the other half of the year doesn't give less attractive looking people any advantage, it just makes thing equal for half of the time.
At least in the developed countries, we should move to constantly adjusting time, anchored either at sunrise (always fixed amount of daylight in the morning) or at sunset (fixed amount of daylight after work). So probably, to stay in familiar time ranges, either sunrise would be at 06:00 every morning, or sunset would be at 18:00 every evening. Of course then we'd need time areas instead of time zones, for example each state being it's own time area in the US, and time in that zone set by some suitable point in each area.
Or it wouldn't have to be anchored exatly at sunrise or sunset either, but that could drift too. The point is, there would not be a large change two times a year, which both maximizes the damage and reduces the advantages as it still isn't optimal for large part of the year and for different locations at different latitudes.
So each clock would be set to UTC, and would calculate the correct local time to show for it's set time area. Clocks would probably show time both in local time and in UTC, as for example TV schedules would need be in UTC except for very local channels. Technology is approaching point where there is no real need to have synchronized clocks accross large areas: businesses are largely inter-time zone already so exact local time in any give time zone doesn't mean much, and we're moving from broadcast media to time-shifted and on-demand delivery of media content.
And then there would be extra coolness to mechanical clocks able to show correct local time for any given time zone, as I believe the mechanism would need to be quite complex, possibly out of scope of building such a thing out of Legos, even :-)
Well the interesting comment in that article is the one from AMD.
'The actual innovation in graphics has definitely been driven by Microsoft in the last ten years or so,' explained AMD's GPU worldwide developer relations manager, Richard Huddy.
One would imagine that a company that develop and make GPU accelerators would be the innovator in the field but apparently AMD is fine with being in Microsoft shadow.
Modern graphics hardware is nothing without a library and API to it. At least for gaming purposes (and excluding consoles, though they really aren't cutting edge by the time they're in the shops anyway), Microsoft controls what programmers can ask hardware to do for them, and therefore ultimately they control what hardware can be designed to do.
Sorry, this is slashdot... that's as far as we know. Maybe someone from the Outside can chime in on what happens when a man and woman get together??
Hopefully it's sweet like ninjas! (I love ninjas)
Oh, I'm pretty sure that the hard disk of your average basement dweller has a decent selection of HD-quality video material about what happens when men and women get together in various combinations...
But they won't work when the moon is below the horizon - then you're looking at a 12-hour dead time.The moon makes a terrible data warehouse if you want to access your stuff in anything like real time on a consistent basis.
Well, we could build some kind of worldwide network here on Earth, so as long as any side of Earth is pointing towards Moon, we could pipe the data over this earthly network.
No, only thing stopping off-site backup on the Moon is that it'd be utterly stupid: exorbitant cost for no major benefit compared to eg. off-site backup to other continent. I mean, any event that is likely to obliterate two continents is also likely to affect the Moon, so it's not really safe!
Now, off-site backup in a solid iron meteorite in a stable, lonely, safe orbit as far out as possible that still gets enough solar radiation to have power from it... But that's useful only for data that would need to survive the red giant phase of Sun, and would need to store data by engraving or some other method that won't get corrupted in a while.
So am I, in C '==' is used to compare two different objects it does not actually define either of them, '=' on the other hand does.
Nitpick: '=' in C is assignment, not definition. And I don't know how assignment of any kind makes any sense in above context, while saying "chamber filled with debris equals no chamber at all" is perfectly valid English turn of phrase, I think.
Ok, I stand corrected, and thanks, have to try that out!
So where does that place Android? Maybe third because there are some embedded Linux distros that are in everything from TVs to coffee pots.
This was about Linux distributions. There aren't any Android Linux distributions. Therefore Android doesn't qualify to take part in this comparison.
Or if there is, please give me link to an ISO so I can try it out! A Live CD would be even better!
As for the GPP, I agree. Every time they find something like this, there's always the "So Earth was seeded by these" speculation. It seems that such materials are rather common in our solar system, both here on Earth, on other planets, and on meteors and asteroids. If such organic molecules can form with relative ease in so many other places in the solar system, I see no reason why they couldn't have formed on Earth as well as it went through it's own geological evolution. Especially when geological processes for forming many complex organic chemicals abiotically have been documented. No doubt that stuff falling from the sky could contribute to organic materials on Earth, but I see no reason to believe that they are a major contribution.
Well, different molecules require different environments to form, and I think it's a least likely, that some necessary molecules could only be formed outside Earth. If they didn't rain on Earth with meteorites, there might not have been life, because critical building blocks would have been missing.
Speculation in my part of course,and in any case it's hard to know which molecules these were, and certainly nothing "astromystical" about it.
A fanboi's mouth when Steve Jobs asks to shit in it?
No, I'm pretty sure that's slightly smaller.
Who gives a rat's ass.
People who read "news for nerds".
It's kind of like, WSJ reporting that government is trying to take direct control of all stock trading, and then some reader asking "Who gives a rat's ass."
That's "Bible tracts".
Love,
Grammar Nazi
No, bible tracks. It's tank tracks made out of Bibles and barbed wire. As a tank with Bible tracks drives over an unbeliever demonstrator, there's a chance that they'll repent and be saved, when they can read the Bible while lying crushed in the ground and bleeding to death.
You'd better get your facts straight before you correct spelling errors of other people!
Wow. He just described Java and its ecosystem... and wasn't Qt and it's C++ followers 100% against Java back in the day (before JambaQt). Wouldn't it be easier to just fix AWT/Swing/SWT?
Maybe he doesn't like Java, but Likes Qt C++? I know I do.
Anyway, with Oracle thing, there's more reason to be suspicious about Java than just not liking it personally. Also, he's not "fixing" anything, he's adding support for something which he already considers sufficiently unbroken. Quite understandable really, because he has power to do that, it's doable by one person (as demonstrated here), while chaning existing toolkits owned and maintained by various organizations... probably not realistic without a Death Star on orbit to use as negotiation tool to get changes to happen.
I really want to be able to use Remote X On my Android phone, that is the one feature I really want that I do not currently have. Hopefully this will allow me to do that sometime in the future.
Maybe in a roundabout way, making it easier to port a "virtual" X server to Android. But Qt itself has nothing to do with X (except on Linux platforms, which Android isn't for this purpose).
Mobile development is slowly but surely standardizing on html + css + javascript for the presentation layer. Qt on Android is about as relevant as a C64 emulator on Android - a cool hobby project for a few enthusiasts.
It'll be at least... 3 years before phones have browsers capable of displaying proper HTML apps. Probably more, as even HTML itself isn't quite ready yet, just in the "technology preview" state. So your statement is kind of premature, until then many apps just can't be made with "web technologies".
Yes. Although, the closest body part would be the male nipple, not the penis. There's nothing naturally arousing about the female breast other than our culturally conditioned worship of it. It doesn't even bring sex to mind until you learn to equate the two.
Oh, there most certainly is something naturally arousing, as breasts are one big factor subconciously used by males to evaluate females ability to successfully raise children (not the only or the biggest factor, but one of the major ones). And even if modern sex doesn't often have anything to do with having offspring, sex drive is still mostly about that (not only about that, it's also about bonding inside the group a bit).
Multiple healthy offspring -> nutrition -> breast milk -> breasts <- producing offsping <- sex <- arousal <- visual inspection of potential mate
Windows is "open" and Mac OS is proprietary? What have you been smoking?
I think I can legally run Windows on virtual machine under MacOS. I don't think I can legally run MacOS on virtual machine under Windows. Your definition of "open" must be pretty funny if it ignores a detail like this.
http://qt.nokia.com/products/platform/qt-for-mac/
I was considering qt, now I'm unsure. With MS around to fuck it up, we'll probably have qt.net in the future.
As long as you're not planning on using it with a phone, go for it. It's LGPL. If MSNokia starts to screw around with it, there'll be fork, so I don't see it going stale, and even if it does, it won't be outdated in a few years yet.