1.6L is considered big? I have a 2L 4cyl Focus in Canada, and that's considered "small" by our standards. Not that I really push my car, but I am curious as to how a 1.3L accelerates [to say hwy speeds].
Very nicely, actually. Bear in mind that these engines are in what you'd consider to be small cars; typically two- or four-door hatchbacks. I used to have a Ford Fiesta with a 1.4l engine (IIRC), and while admittedly I'm a conservative driver, I had no complaints about acceleration. (There is one hill near where I live which it didn't like going up in third, but that was about it.)
A 1.3L must be near redline though to go from say 40km/h to 100km/h on an onramp.
Unfortunately my old Fiesta didn't have a rev counter, but peak torque was at about roughly 4 thou IIRC; the gearboxes are calibrated so that 70mph in fifth makes the engine run near peak efficiency, which is usually a bit below peak torque. I'd accelerate from 30mph to about 60 in third gear at a little above that, and then change down to fifth once I was up to speed in the slow lane. It was definitely pushing the engine above normal town driving, but not overly so.
The issue is not that it restricts use, but that it's triggered by use. The GPL does not apply to people who USE GPL software, only to people who redistribute it...
Spot on; which is why it's so annoying when people insist on using the GPL as an EULA. That's like asking employees to sign a script of Spongebob Squarepants instead of a contract, before they start work --- not only is it completely meaningless and useless, it brands you as someone who doesn't know what you're talking about.
A redistribution license (like the GPLv2) is NOT an EULA. They are totally different things.
everything uses DC internally. Some hardware allows for DC inputs. using DC across the board would greatly reduce cooling costs.
Weeeelll... not necessarily. When you start dealing with long wires, you end up having to deal with voltage drops across those wires. If your computer needs 5.000V to run reliably, you simply can't feed it with 5.000V produced by a power supply ten metres away, because by the time the electricity reaches the computer it won't be 5.000V any more.
Which means you need to feed it with some other voltage, and convert it to 5.000V at the computer itself. Which in turn means either DC-to-DC converters, which are relatively inefficient, or AC-to-DC converters, which are far more efficient. Add to this that AC can be trivially stepped up or down in voltage by using a transformer, and that transmitting high-voltage AC is substantially more efficient than low-voltage AC, and suddenly the picture gets more complex.
It may well turn out that it is more efficient to transmit your power to each chassis as 120 or 240V AC, and then convert it to 3.3V/5V/12V DC on the chassis.
Alternatively, just use superconducting power cables and most of the problem goes away.
In fact I'd say that the Balance requires such beings, unless of course sex is inherently evil in the DnD universe.
You should check out The Book Of Erotic Fantasy, a completely genuine and official add-on module. Despite the badly photoshopped nude photos decorating the inside, and the occasional mention of things you would really rather not know (did you know that gnomes like group sex? Are you now happy with this knowledge?), it's actually quite interesting. There are a number of specialist classes inside that would actually fit in quite well to a non-dungeon-crawl RPG session. And no, they're not what you're thinking of.
...if you've played Planescape: Torment, then Fall-From-Grace's character could come straight out of this book.
Are you sure about that? I can't see any way for the m to get cancelled out.
When I figure it out, I get:
density r = m (assuming unit volume, as you are), acceleration a = F/r, therefore a = F/m;
impact velocity v = 2as, therefore v = 2FVs / m;
impact energy E = 1/2 m v^2, therefore E = 2 F^2 s^2 V^2 m^-1.
F, s and V are all constant, as you point out, which makes the only factor the inverse of the mass. Which makes intuitive sense; energy scales with the square of the velocity, and a light object will be moving faster than a heavy object.
I'm not sure whether adding in the 3g shuttle launch acceleration would make a difference to this.
Crap, several of our T1 lines were cut last week by a government employee who "forgot" to get a map of buried cables before digging.
My father recently put in a fence. As there were streelights in the vicinity, he called the electricity company to inquire about where the cables were.
Not only did they send him a map, but they also sent a guy round with a van and a cable detector to make sure that they were actually where the map was (free of charge). My general impression was that they were delighted that someone actually thought to ask, rather than just digging, breaking something, and causing lots of expensive damage...
I'm booting from a Live CD. Did you miss that part? Or is it that you don't know what "chroot" is?
Oh, boy. Yes, I do. You apparently don't.
When you do chroot [dir] [cmd], the root directory is changed to [dir] and then [cmd] is executed from that root directory. If you don't specify [cmd] it defaults to/bin/sh.
Which means that when you do chroot/mnt/compromised, then what you've actually done is loaded a compromised binary off the compromised file system which has pulled in compromised shared libraries etc. As root. If you're going to do that you might as well not bother with the live CD in the first place.
What you meant to do was use dpkg's --root option. This allows you to tell a dpkg that's been loaded from one root file system to work on another root file system. This way you avoid running any compromised binaries and screwing yourself over. Of course, this would require you to actually know what you were doing, rather than merely thinking you know what you're doing.
To put it in very simple terms for you, the SYSTEM would not have been compromised, just that USER's account.
Oh, look, the worm's hacked your.bashrc to use a custom sudo command! Congratulations, your USER account has just contaminated your SYSTEM (as you so quaintly put it).
On your average Linux desktop these days, there's only one real user account. This means that all the valuable data is owned by user, which in turn means that if that account gets compromised you're just as screwed as if/bin/sh got compromised. Probably more so;/bin/sh can be reinstalled from the CD. Your data files can't.
You know the saying, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing? That's you. You see, you need to be an expert to fix this kind of problem. You think you know how. You don't. In fact, what you know is actively dangerous: you're going to end up with a system that you think is clean, but which is still potentially contaminated. If you knew less, you'd be far safer --- in your situation, a complete reinstallation would be far more reliable and rather less work.
Of course, it probably wouldn't help, because you seem to be rather sketchy as to the difference between an executable and a data file and you probably wouldn't quarantine your user data properly...
Boot the Live CD.
Chroot the local hard drive. Use the package manager to validate the files in the directories. Any that you cannot validate, you move to a safe location. If necessary, re-install the package that owns those files.
Congratulations! You've just been pwned. You've just used a compromised copy of dpkg to verify that all the package-installed executables on your system are clean. Even if you hadn't made the elemental mistake of running compromised software from a known-clean session, this particular worm is living in the executable, modifiable, uncheckable configuration files in/etc/default/* (with some backup copies in ~/.login and ~/.bashrc just for amusement value).
It's that easy.
Yup. It is, indeed, that easy.
But then, you're such an expert you knew all this already. Heavens, you must know what you're doing --- you run alpha software on a production machine.
It is A registry. But I can boot a Linux box WITHOUT it. And one I can boot it, I can fix it.
...and you can boot a Windows machine without one (to a command line).
I'm typing this on a machine that's been upgraded, online, to Gutsy Gibbon all the way from Hoary Hedgehog.
Neat trick, given that Gutsy isn't even out yet...
It's not magic. If something breaks, it can be backed out.
Of course it can. I never said it couldn't. What I said was that it's frequently not worth the bother. Why should I spend two days figuring out which file's been corrupted so I can fix it when I can archive of all my data and reinstall in an hour? For a server, sure, it's worth doing. Not necessarily so for a desktop.
And I would use that, how, to fix virus/rootkit on a Windows machine? Be specific.
And I would use a Knoppix CD, how, to fix a virus/rootkit on a Linux machine? Be specific.
You use platform-specific knowledge, you numbskull. I can't do it because I haven't had the training, but I know people who can and have. Likewise, I can fix a broken Linux machine because I have had training --- but they can't, because they haven't.
Strange, because that kind of contradicts your other claims. It's the packaging system that allows me to validate the operating system and apps.
Oh, really? When did you last audit all the source code on your system? Actually, I suspect that you just install the binary blobs and trust them. A packaging system has absolutely nothing to do with 'validating' the operating system (whatever that means). There are plenty of Linux distributions that don't have packaging systems; they tend to get put together by builders, that construct and entire bootable file system in one pass --- exactly the way Windows is put together.
I use Linux every day, professionally and at home. It's OK. There's tonnes of stuff wrong with it but on the whole I like it. I used to use Windows every day, professionally. It's OK. There's tonnes of stuff wrong with it, and on the whole I don't like it (which is why I use Linux at home). Both platforms have flaws, huge gaping ones. Both platforms have a solid underpinning of good technology that make them work. I would certainly pick Windows over Linux for some tasks, and I'd certainly pick Linux over Windows for some tasks --- and I'd pick the BSDs over either for other tasks, too.
You accuse me of not using Linux. I suspect you've never tried to use Windows, not properly (although you probably play games on it, just to add that hypocritical edge to your post). You should try --- you'd learn something.
gconf is, basically, a registry. Yes, a better one, but it's still doing the same job in much the same way.
#2. Which is why Microsoft shops advocate the "Wipe & Reload" method of "support". It broke, don't spend time trying to fix it.
This is because it's easy. Fixing something requires diagnosing what went wrong in the first place. Frequently for simple machines, it's simply not worth doing --- the amount of effort involved is vastly greater than there would be in flattening the system and starting again. This applies to Linux, as well; cruft builds up in the corners, configurations get slightly broken, and after a while it's frequently easier to reinstall than to clean it out.
#3. Viruses, trojans & worms. At least with Linux I can boot from a "Live CD" and chroot the local hard drive and check it / edit it to remove problems.
The only cases that I actually talked to a policeman were on the highway, and I had to pay hundreds of dollars and time to show up in traffic court.
Well, yeah --- what did you expect? You're a criminal. Exceeding the speed limit is against the rules you agreed to abide by when you got your license to operate heavy machinery in a crowded area. You can hardly blame the police for that.
Sure, you'd probably drop by a few nebulae and stars and even planets, but after you've seen a few, where to then? You could travel to other planets for lifetimes and still not run across intelligent life on other planets. It's not that truly interesting things aren't out there, it's just that the universe isn't very conducive to producing life-bearing planets.
That is all true --- but you're not going to find intelligent life on their home planets. You're going to meet explorers looking at the same sights you are.
Given a Perfect(TM) spacecraft, there are a relatively small number of Interesting Things in the universe --- there are only about 12000 known quasars, for example, and I'm sure there are other, rarer Interesting Things to take a look at. Closer to home, space-going travellers in Milky Way Galaxy will tend to congregate at the black hole at Galactic Centre if you want to meet locals. And, naturally, everywhere you go you leave bouys saying hello and inviting people to meet up and some arbitrary location. Eventually you're going to run into someone.
Also, bear in mind that a Perfect(TM) spacecraft drive also implies that a Perfect(TM) communications system could be possible... you may just be able to turn on the hyper-radio and ask if there's anyone out there who wants a drink.
(My pet hypothesis for the Fermi Paradox is that there's lots of people out there, but they're not talking on the same system that we are. Long-distance communication using electromagnetic waves sucks, they're expensive, unreliable and slow. Let's suggest that there's something better available once technology gets good enough --- it doesn't matter how much better, just that it'll be the preferred mechanism once you discover it. Let's call this Q waves. The window where a civilisation knows about EM waves but doesn't know about Q waves is likely to be quite small, on the order of a hundred years or so. Given how slow EM waves are, by the time you receive a message that's been sent using EM waves, the sender's probably not using them any more... so given that you're using the Q spectrum for your own communications anyway, why bother even listening on the EM spectrum?
This neatly explains why we haven't been able to pick up an EM sources in the sky; there aren't any. But there will be plenty of Q sources, and if any of those are close enough and interested enough to have picked up our own EM emissions, they'll be patiently waiting for us to build Q receivers so we can hear their replies.
Incidentally, in the real world, high-frequency gravity waves might make a good candidate for Q waves. We know practically nothing about the gravitational spectrum, but while gravity waves propagate at c, they don't get blocked by interstellar dust, and there's a good chance that there aren't very many natural sources of high-frequency gravitational waves to produce interference. That makes them a considerable improvement over EM waves. Now all we need to do is to find a way of sending and receiving them...)
Good day, Mr. Smith. Mr. Jones would like to see your voting receipt now. Naturally I am sure that you voted as agreed in our little business arrangement, because if you didn't, Mr. Jones will be very upset...
Sure, and the Pledge of Allegiance in the US is satanic because you are worshiping an idol (the flag). And yes, I've heard more than one person claim this.
Hey, just look at this stanza from the British National Anthem:
O Lord, our God, arise,
Scatter her enemies,
And make them fall.
Confound their politics,
Frustrate their knavish tricks,
On Thee our hopes we fix,
God save us all.
Knavish tricks? Oo-er. Basically, national anthems are all full of crap, and no one genuinely takes them seriously. Plus, they're usually really badly written. (Arise/Enemies? God save us all, indeed.)
So, this would effectively *increase* the power consumption of LCD monitors, which are more prevalent everyday, and probably the majority of monitor sales these days.
Where do you think the light goes that escapes? It travels until it hits something, whereupon it turns into heat.
What do you think happens to the light that doesn't escape? It hits the LCD layer, is absorbed, and turns into heat.
In both cases, the same amount of energy is being used to generate the light, and exactly 100% of that light gets turned into heat when it gets absorbed (assuming the monitor's not pointing into outer space, of course). The only possible difference between whether the pixel is black or white is whether the heat is generated in the monitor or in some random wall.
So the black background might make your monitor warm up, but it won't use any additional energy.
Why not do a mock up using 5 keys of a regular keyboard?
Most modern keyboard have lousy support for multi-key combinations --- my Microsoft Internet Keyboard (which is otherwise pretty good) can only cope with three simultaneous keypresses, plus a modifier key. Cheaper ones can only handle two. If you hold down more keys, then it'll start forgetting which keys you pressed earlier and won't generate keyup events when you release them.
You might have more luck with a game controller, which handle keys differently and don't suffer from this.
How long do we have to wait before C/C++ gets rids of this short, long, double crap? (Is it really that hard to have a stardard pragma that disables up-casting, standardized syntax for alignment?)
Not entirely certain what you mean here, but have you seen ? It defines a bunch of standard types like int8_t, uint8_t (sized integers), int_least8_t (smallest type containing at least that number of bits), int_fast8_t (fastest type containing at least that number of bits), intptr_t (type containing enough bits to store a pointer without data loss), etc? All incredibly useful, and actually in the C standard, too.
The next rover mission will no longer rely on solar panels. It will have nuclear reactors as the main source of power.
That's not a reactor --- that's an RTG, which is an entirely different kind of beast. RTGs are purely passive devices, just small lumps of plutonium that get warm and generate electricity via thermocouples. They're physically small, cheap, low-powered, simple, reliable, incredibly tough, and are ideal for this kind of mission. Fission reactors are none of the above.
RTGs are the devices that have kept the Voyager probes running and producing good science for nearly thirty years now, quite a lot of it in what amounts to interstellar space.
I would tend to dispute the notion that "psychologists have demonstrated that this is fundamentally flawed". Demonstrated how, exactly?
To a very large extent, people will believe whatever you tell them. Look at the vast amounts of money spent on advertising, marketing, campaigning, propaganda, and electioneering that go on in the world today. Your choices depend on what you believe, and what you believe depends on how you're brought up, and what people tell you, and the images you see in the media, etc, etc.
If you're in a position of power, and you want to persuade people to go along with an unpopular decision, you do not educate them as to why the decision has to be made and let them make their own choice --- this doesn't work. You change their minds for them, using powerful emotional and behavioural conditioning schemes. It works scarily well. And you don't often cotton on to the fact that it's happening to you, because from your perspective it's all merely reinforcing attitudes and behaviours that you are already conditioned to believe are 'right'.
People really do have much less free will than you might think.
Gold has the use as money, mystique and respect through the millenia.
Yeah, it only has that mystique because we consider it to be valuable --- you've got a tautology here: you've just said here is that gold is valuable because we think gold is valuable. It has very little intrinsic value of its own --- it's reasonably (but not especially) rare, it has some interesting (but not especially interesting) chemical properties, and it looks nice. A currency based on gold is just as artifical as any other fiat currency; the mere fact that gold is the basis will cause its value to diverge radically from its own intrinsic value.
(Compare with diamonds, which are just carbon arranged funny, and carbon is the third-cheapest substance in the universe.)
By all means base your currency on a physical object, or not, depending on your favourite economic theory, but you should probably use a basis that actually has intrinsic worth in its own right. Say, a fixed period of standardised human labour? The joule? A loaf of bread?
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Is it? Er, why?
Very nicely, actually. Bear in mind that these engines are in what you'd consider to be small cars; typically two- or four-door hatchbacks. I used to have a Ford Fiesta with a 1.4l engine (IIRC), and while admittedly I'm a conservative driver, I had no complaints about acceleration. (There is one hill near where I live which it didn't like going up in third, but that was about it.)
Unfortunately my old Fiesta didn't have a rev counter, but peak torque was at about roughly 4 thou IIRC; the gearboxes are calibrated so that 70mph in fifth makes the engine run near peak efficiency, which is usually a bit below peak torque. I'd accelerate from 30mph to about 60 in third gear at a little above that, and then change down to fifth once I was up to speed in the slow lane. It was definitely pushing the engine above normal town driving, but not overly so.
The 6500 is a popular processor architecture made by MOS.
Spot on; which is why it's so annoying when people insist on using the GPL as an EULA. That's like asking employees to sign a script of Spongebob Squarepants instead of a contract, before they start work --- not only is it completely meaningless and useless, it brands you as someone who doesn't know what you're talking about.
A redistribution license (like the GPLv2) is NOT an EULA. They are totally different things.
Weeeelll... not necessarily. When you start dealing with long wires, you end up having to deal with voltage drops across those wires. If your computer needs 5.000V to run reliably, you simply can't feed it with 5.000V produced by a power supply ten metres away, because by the time the electricity reaches the computer it won't be 5.000V any more.
Which means you need to feed it with some other voltage, and convert it to 5.000V at the computer itself. Which in turn means either DC-to-DC converters, which are relatively inefficient, or AC-to-DC converters, which are far more efficient. Add to this that AC can be trivially stepped up or down in voltage by using a transformer, and that transmitting high-voltage AC is substantially more efficient than low-voltage AC, and suddenly the picture gets more complex.
It may well turn out that it is more efficient to transmit your power to each chassis as 120 or 240V AC, and then convert it to 3.3V/5V/12V DC on the chassis.
Alternatively, just use superconducting power cables and most of the problem goes away.
You should check out The Book Of Erotic Fantasy, a completely genuine and official add-on module. Despite the badly photoshopped nude photos decorating the inside, and the occasional mention of things you would really rather not know (did you know that gnomes like group sex? Are you now happy with this knowledge?), it's actually quite interesting. There are a number of specialist classes inside that would actually fit in quite well to a non-dungeon-crawl RPG session. And no, they're not what you're thinking of.
...if you've played Planescape: Torment, then Fall-From-Grace's character could come straight out of this book.
Are you sure about that? I can't see any way for the m to get cancelled out.
When I figure it out, I get:
density r = m (assuming unit volume, as you are), acceleration a = F/r, therefore a = F/m;
impact velocity v = 2as, therefore v = 2FVs / m;
impact energy E = 1/2 m v^2, therefore E = 2 F^2 s^2 V^2 m^-1.
F, s and V are all constant, as you point out, which makes the only factor the inverse of the mass. Which makes intuitive sense; energy scales with the square of the velocity, and a light object will be moving faster than a heavy object.
I'm not sure whether adding in the 3g shuttle launch acceleration would make a difference to this.
My father recently put in a fence. As there were streelights in the vicinity, he called the electricity company to inquire about where the cables were.
Not only did they send him a map, but they also sent a guy round with a van and a cable detector to make sure that they were actually where the map was (free of charge). My general impression was that they were delighted that someone actually thought to ask, rather than just digging, breaking something, and causing lots of expensive damage...
At what level does the quality of the music become so low that reducing the audio quality actually improves the overall experience?
Hitachi_Hard-Drive_Project_-_Noriko_Version.mp3
Written by James Postlethwaite, whose home page I can't find, and made entirely out of hard drive failure noises (Hitachi provide a nice set of wavs).
...I can't get this sequence from ReBoot out of my mind when reading the story...
Oh, boy. Yes, I do. You apparently don't.
When you do chroot [dir] [cmd], the root directory is changed to [dir] and then [cmd] is executed from that root directory. If you don't specify [cmd] it defaults to /bin/sh.
Which means that when you do chroot /mnt/compromised, then what you've actually done is loaded a compromised binary off the compromised file system which has pulled in compromised shared libraries etc. As root. If you're going to do that you might as well not bother with the live CD in the first place.
What you meant to do was use dpkg's --root option. This allows you to tell a dpkg that's been loaded from one root file system to work on another root file system. This way you avoid running any compromised binaries and screwing yourself over. Of course, this would require you to actually know what you were doing, rather than merely thinking you know what you're doing.
Oh, look, the worm's hacked your .bashrc to use a custom sudo command! Congratulations, your USER account has just contaminated your SYSTEM (as you so quaintly put it).
On your average Linux desktop these days, there's only one real user account. This means that all the valuable data is owned by user, which in turn means that if that account gets compromised you're just as screwed as if /bin/sh got compromised. Probably more so; /bin/sh can be reinstalled from the CD. Your data files can't.
You know the saying, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing? That's you. You see, you need to be an expert to fix this kind of problem. You think you know how. You don't. In fact, what you know is actively dangerous: you're going to end up with a system that you think is clean, but which is still potentially contaminated. If you knew less, you'd be far safer --- in your situation, a complete reinstallation would be far more reliable and rather less work.
Of course, it probably wouldn't help, because you seem to be rather sketchy as to the difference between an executable and a data file and you probably wouldn't quarantine your user data properly...
Congratulations! You've just been pwned. You've just used a compromised copy of dpkg to verify that all the package-installed executables on your system are clean. Even if you hadn't made the elemental mistake of running compromised software from a known-clean session, this particular worm is living in the executable, modifiable, uncheckable configuration files in /etc/default/* (with some backup copies in ~/.login and ~/.bashrc just for amusement value).
Yup. It is, indeed, that easy.
But then, you're such an expert you knew all this already. Heavens, you must know what you're doing --- you run alpha software on a production machine.
...and you can boot a Windows machine without one (to a command line).
Neat trick, given that Gutsy isn't even out yet...
Of course it can. I never said it couldn't. What I said was that it's frequently not worth the bother. Why should I spend two days figuring out which file's been corrupted so I can fix it when I can archive of all my data and reinstall in an hour? For a server, sure, it's worth doing. Not necessarily so for a desktop.
And I would use a Knoppix CD, how, to fix a virus/rootkit on a Linux machine? Be specific.
You use platform-specific knowledge, you numbskull. I can't do it because I haven't had the training, but I know people who can and have. Likewise, I can fix a broken Linux machine because I have had training --- but they can't, because they haven't.
Oh, really? When did you last audit all the source code on your system? Actually, I suspect that you just install the binary blobs and trust them. A packaging system has absolutely nothing to do with 'validating' the operating system (whatever that means). There are plenty of Linux distributions that don't have packaging systems; they tend to get put together by builders, that construct and entire bootable file system in one pass --- exactly the way Windows is put together.
I use Linux every day, professionally and at home. It's OK. There's tonnes of stuff wrong with it but on the whole I like it. I used to use Windows every day, professionally. It's OK. There's tonnes of stuff wrong with it, and on the whole I don't like it (which is why I use Linux at home). Both platforms have flaws, huge gaping ones. Both platforms have a solid underpinning of good technology that make them work. I would certainly pick Windows over Linux for some tasks, and I'd certainly pick Linux over Windows for some tasks --- and I'd pick the BSDs over either for other tasks, too.
You accuse me of not using Linux. I suspect you've never tried to use Windows, not properly (although you probably play games on it, just to add that hypocritical edge to your post). You should try --- you'd learn something.
gconf is, basically, a registry. Yes, a better one, but it's still doing the same job in much the same way.
This is because it's easy. Fixing something requires diagnosing what went wrong in the first place. Frequently for simple machines, it's simply not worth doing --- the amount of effort involved is vastly greater than there would be in flattening the system and starting again. This applies to Linux, as well; cruft builds up in the corners, configurations get slightly broken, and after a while it's frequently easier to reinstall than to clean it out.
Windows Live CD.
I'll give you that one. Of course, there's nothing stopping you running a Debian userland inside a colinux box...
Well, yeah --- what did you expect? You're a criminal. Exceeding the speed limit is against the rules you agreed to abide by when you got your license to operate heavy machinery in a crowded area. You can hardly blame the police for that.
That is all true --- but you're not going to find intelligent life on their home planets. You're going to meet explorers looking at the same sights you are.
Given a Perfect(TM) spacecraft, there are a relatively small number of Interesting Things in the universe --- there are only about 12000 known quasars, for example, and I'm sure there are other, rarer Interesting Things to take a look at. Closer to home, space-going travellers in Milky Way Galaxy will tend to congregate at the black hole at Galactic Centre if you want to meet locals. And, naturally, everywhere you go you leave bouys saying hello and inviting people to meet up and some arbitrary location. Eventually you're going to run into someone.
Also, bear in mind that a Perfect(TM) spacecraft drive also implies that a Perfect(TM) communications system could be possible... you may just be able to turn on the hyper-radio and ask if there's anyone out there who wants a drink.
(My pet hypothesis for the Fermi Paradox is that there's lots of people out there, but they're not talking on the same system that we are. Long-distance communication using electromagnetic waves sucks, they're expensive, unreliable and slow. Let's suggest that there's something better available once technology gets good enough --- it doesn't matter how much better, just that it'll be the preferred mechanism once you discover it. Let's call this Q waves. The window where a civilisation knows about EM waves but doesn't know about Q waves is likely to be quite small, on the order of a hundred years or so. Given how slow EM waves are, by the time you receive a message that's been sent using EM waves, the sender's probably not using them any more... so given that you're using the Q spectrum for your own communications anyway, why bother even listening on the EM spectrum?
This neatly explains why we haven't been able to pick up an EM sources in the sky; there aren't any. But there will be plenty of Q sources, and if any of those are close enough and interested enough to have picked up our own EM emissions, they'll be patiently waiting for us to build Q receivers so we can hear their replies.
Incidentally, in the real world, high-frequency gravity waves might make a good candidate for Q waves. We know practically nothing about the gravitational spectrum, but while gravity waves propagate at c, they don't get blocked by interstellar dust, and there's a good chance that there aren't very many natural sources of high-frequency gravitational waves to produce interference. That makes them a considerable improvement over EM waves. Now all we need to do is to find a way of sending and receiving them...)
Good day, Mr. Smith. Mr. Jones would like to see your voting receipt now. Naturally I am sure that you voted as agreed in our little business arrangement, because if you didn't, Mr. Jones will be very upset...
Hey, just look at this stanza from the British National Anthem:
O Lord, our God, arise,
Scatter her enemies,
And make them fall.
Confound their politics,
Frustrate their knavish tricks,
On Thee our hopes we fix,
God save us all.
Knavish tricks? Oo-er. Basically, national anthems are all full of crap, and no one genuinely takes them seriously. Plus, they're usually really badly written. (Arise/Enemies? God save us all, indeed.)
Where do you think the light goes that escapes? It travels until it hits something, whereupon it turns into heat.
What do you think happens to the light that doesn't escape? It hits the LCD layer, is absorbed, and turns into heat.
In both cases, the same amount of energy is being used to generate the light, and exactly 100% of that light gets turned into heat when it gets absorbed (assuming the monitor's not pointing into outer space, of course). The only possible difference between whether the pixel is black or white is whether the heat is generated in the monitor or in some random wall.
So the black background might make your monitor warm up, but it won't use any additional energy.
Most modern keyboard have lousy support for multi-key combinations --- my Microsoft Internet Keyboard (which is otherwise pretty good) can only cope with three simultaneous keypresses, plus a modifier key. Cheaper ones can only handle two. If you hold down more keys, then it'll start forgetting which keys you pressed earlier and won't generate keyup events when you release them.
You might have more luck with a game controller, which handle keys differently and don't suffer from this.
Not entirely certain what you mean here, but have you seen ? It defines a bunch of standard types like int8_t, uint8_t (sized integers), int_least8_t (smallest type containing at least that number of bits), int_fast8_t (fastest type containing at least that number of bits), intptr_t (type containing enough bits to store a pointer without data loss), etc? All incredibly useful, and actually in the C standard, too.
That's not a reactor --- that's an RTG, which is an entirely different kind of beast. RTGs are purely passive devices, just small lumps of plutonium that get warm and generate electricity via thermocouples. They're physically small, cheap, low-powered, simple, reliable, incredibly tough, and are ideal for this kind of mission. Fission reactors are none of the above.
RTGs are the devices that have kept the Voyager probes running and producing good science for nearly thirty years now, quite a lot of it in what amounts to interstellar space.
To a very large extent, people will believe whatever you tell them. Look at the vast amounts of money spent on advertising, marketing, campaigning, propaganda, and electioneering that go on in the world today. Your choices depend on what you believe, and what you believe depends on how you're brought up, and what people tell you, and the images you see in the media, etc, etc.
If you're in a position of power, and you want to persuade people to go along with an unpopular decision, you do not educate them as to why the decision has to be made and let them make their own choice --- this doesn't work. You change their minds for them, using powerful emotional and behavioural conditioning schemes. It works scarily well. And you don't often cotton on to the fact that it's happening to you, because from your perspective it's all merely reinforcing attitudes and behaviours that you are already conditioned to believe are 'right'.
People really do have much less free will than you might think.
Yeah, it only has that mystique because we consider it to be valuable --- you've got a tautology here: you've just said here is that gold is valuable because we think gold is valuable. It has very little intrinsic value of its own --- it's reasonably (but not especially) rare, it has some interesting (but not especially interesting) chemical properties, and it looks nice. A currency based on gold is just as artifical as any other fiat currency; the mere fact that gold is the basis will cause its value to diverge radically from its own intrinsic value.
(Compare with diamonds, which are just carbon arranged funny, and carbon is the third-cheapest substance in the universe.)
By all means base your currency on a physical object, or not, depending on your favourite economic theory, but you should probably use a basis that actually has intrinsic worth in its own right. Say, a fixed period of standardised human labour? The joule? A loaf of bread?