I think the Sendmail cf file made more sense back when computers were slower.
No, sendmail's complexity/flexibility made sense because there were oodles of very different mail protocols. Now, almost everything can be sent from point A to B via SMTP, but back then there were lots of different options, and the options were needed to make it all work. (Granted, the options are still available now, but few people use them anymore.)
And really, it's not that bad once you get used to it.
And besides, it was one of the first MTAs out there -- and yet it still exists today. Other MTAs have come and gone, many even using what's been learned from sendmail, but sendmail still exists and still routes a large percentage of all e-mail today.
Average = (arithmetic) mean only by custom, not by definition.
Odd, answer.com's dictionary seems to disagree with you (see 1b.) Or if we ask Webster, it goes both ways -- 1a refers to mean, median or mode, but 2b is strictly mean. If you ask google what `Average' means you get many answers, which tend to boil down to 1) average is mean, 2) average is mean/median or mode, or 3) average means something else (i.e. none of the above.) (There is one result that says `average is median', but if you look at the source for that more carefully, it actually falls into the `average is mean/median or mode' category.)
Eventually, what is the custom will become the definition, and in this case I'd say it's most of the way there already. People tend to use the word average to refer to mean/median/mode, but in most of the cases where this is done, it's generally assumed that the three are the same.
But yes, I do agree with you... words mean what people want them to mean. But if you give somebody a bunch of numbers and ask them to find the average, will most people 1) add them up and divide by the number of numbers, or 2) sort the numbers and find the number in the middle, or 3) find the number that is the most common in the group? People may not understand the difference between mean, median and mode... but they generally do know how to calculate averages, and they will generally use the formula for calculating the mean.
Well, I did say `nobody that I'm aware of'. But good point.
In any event, for every human with more than two legs, there's probably a thousand or so (of course, I could easily be off by an order of magnitude or two here) humans with one or zero legs, so it doesn't affect the ultimate conclusion, that `Most people have more than the average number of legs.'
... who were two individuals above the sixth rib but who shared a single body below.
Wouldn't that qualify as two people with two legs between them?:)
Folks like this are still born today. They just don't get to become rich.
I doubt they became rich back then either. Sure, they could make a living being in the freak show, but I'll bet they rarely became rich -- that was reserved for the circus owner, and maybe (but I doubt it) a few star performers. Ultimately, even if you're the #1 freak in the freak show, you're still a freak, and normal society will shun you, even if the culture inside a circus is far more accepting.
Ok, looks like at least Bettie Lou Williams made some good money. Though I have to wonder how much of the money she made Best kept...
It is perfectly possible for the majority of people to be above the mean [average] or modal [average] but impossible for the majority to be above the median [average].
Average usually refers to mean, as you're probably aware, but you're also right that people tend to be pretty loose with the definition.
In any event, my favorite example for when talking about this sort of thing is this --
Most people have more than the average number of legs.
... and it's not just most, but probably around 98%.
In case an explanation is required (it shouldn't be, but some need one), most people have two legs. A few people have one or zero legs, but nobody that I'm aware of has three legs (we'll leave that joke alone) so the average (mean) number of legs that people have is 1.98 or so, and most people have more legs than that. The median and the mode are both 2, but the average is 1.98 or so.
And as for `incompetent, and unaware of it', I'd consider those results to be pretty much common sense, or at least they mirror my experiences. One thing I've learned over the years is that it's not always about what you know -- it's also about what you do when you don't know (know how to look it up!) and most importantly, to know when you don't know. It's true that most of the really smart people I know know lots of things, but they also know what they don't know.
As for Jerry Taylor, I can understand him not understanding the message he found on the web page. Yes, it's there in relatively plain English, but people do make mistakes. But really, if somebody responds to you politely and points out that they're not to blame and that somebody else is, perhaps you should at least consider that they might be telling the truth and check into that before continuing the tirade. And his `apology' (I use the term lightly here) at the end (the site is down, but I read it earlier... it was `it's unfortunate that it took all these accusations to get to the truth' or
something like that)... if there was ever any doubt before, it tells us a lot about how Jerry responds to people who point out his mistakes. Jerry may have welcomed the publicity then, but I doubt he does now. I wonder if he even has a job anymore.
No, it's not. Even if you totally ignore air resistance (which is incredibly strong at mach 1, let alone mach 7), if you drop something from 200 miles up (which is approximately the altitude of the ISS, for example), it'll only be going at mach 5 or so when it hits the ground.
A 400 mile drop would do it, however. Can you find a 400 mile high hill, somewhere where there's no air resistance?
... which is why I said supposedly, though perhaps theoretically would have been better.
and also the idea about tachyons says that above 1c its the reverse, it would take infinite energy to decelerate to 1c, though I don't know about what effects on time would be expected.
I think that a tachyon would exist backwards in time relative to us, and as it slowed and approached 1 c, time as seen by it would slow (but still be going backwards.) Of course, I'm not sure how tachyons would interact with normal, slower matter, so even if they did exist, they may not be detectable. Ultimately, they're just a theory, something suggested by the math involved in general relativity.
Apparantly the term tachyon is also used to describe constructs with imaginary mass (another interpitation of the same equations.) In any event, it's all theories for now, with little way to prove/corroborate or disprove them at this time.
Also if you go near 1c you wouldn't leave colored trails, you would just look like a blur to anyone watching that wasn't going at near relatavistic speeds.
In case it wasn't clear, that was a joke. When the Enterprise hits warp one, colored trails are left (usually by the sharp edges of the ship), the ship goes off the screen in a hurry, and a commercial almost always follows.
Also (from what I remember) in startrek they weren't traveling at warp in 'normal space' but 'sub space'.
I never really paid much attention to the techo-babble.
Either way, the NASA article is silly, and I'm surprised that somebody even bothered to write it. The idea of the effects involved are certainly sound, but the combination is silly. The idea of this radiation somehow counteracting the reduced aging? More likely is that you wouldn't age faster, you'd just die of cancer (if slow) or radiation poisoning (if fast.) You'd still be a young man, but still dead from radiation poisioning.
I know that you can't just be accelerated to C or 1/2 without infinite force.
You can't reach 1 c, because it would require infinite amounts of energy... that's one way of looking at it, and as accurate as any other. As for 0.5 c, you can reach that -- you'll just need massive amounts of energy to accelerate a macroscopic object to that speed, at least by our current 20th century standards.
All I'm saying is that we won't know untill we try
Until we try what? Try to accelerate Geraldo to 0.5 c out of the solar system? I'd pay a dollar to see that!
The effects of relativity have been measured experimentally. Atomic clocks put onto planes and flown around the world have been found to run very slightly slower, and subatomic particles that are known to last for X picoseconds have been found to last much longer when zipping about at 0.999c. Neat stuff -- coming up with theories like this is one thing, but actually showing the effects in the real world -- that's what's really neat.
1) warp 1 is usually considered to be the speed of light, not 1/2 c.
Scratch that -- I see what you meant. (The rest still applies, however.)
In any event, general relativity basically says that reaching 1 c is impossible. It doesn't say that you can't go faster than that (tachyons supposedly spend their entire life above the speed of light) -- it just says that matter can't go exactly the speed of light. As for what exactly happens at warp one, you'll have to ask Gene Roddenbery for the specifics, but from what I can tell, time continues normally, but your ship goes off really fast, leaving colored trails behind it, and a commercial usually follows very quickly.
Obviously not, because your description shows that you're confused about how it works. Which isn't surprising -- most people are. I've got a degree in Physics, and I still find much of this stuff to be very counter-intuitive.
As for the situation of a guy travelling at 0.99999c for a while and then coming back to Earth at the same speed, the two trips do NOT cancel out. The difference is that the traveller was accelerated to that speed, then deaccelerated until he stopped relative to the Earth, and then accelerated back to 0.99999c in the opposite direction, and then deaccelerated again (we hope) when he reached the Earth. You can't just magically reach a given speed -- you have to be accelerated to that speed, and that's where the situation of the traveller is not the same as the situation of the Earth.
If you traveled at half the speed of light (assuming time doesn't pass at warp 1): 50 years pass on earth, 25 for you.
1) warp 1 is usually considered to be the speed of light, not 1/2 c.
2) time dialation is not linear. At 0.5 c, time would be slowed by a factor of 1/sqrt(1-0.5**2) or only about 15%, not 50%.
People should just take audio recordings of lectures instead.
Then you can automate transcription.
Good luck with that. Sure, dictation programs do exist, but they generally can't just take spoken words and accurately convert them to text. You'll be doing this yourself, manually. Which means that your one hour class will now take at least two hours. Granted, you might learn something by doing the transcription, but maybe not.
Seems to me the most effective method would be to go to class, take sparse notes (by hand or on computer, whatever works) and buy the professionally done notes from whatever service makes them, if available.
Personally, I was a bad student in college. I generally went to class, but I still missed quite a bit, and I was bad about studying and doing homework. I did OK because I was smart, not because I worked hard. They say that you're supposed to spend 3 hours outside of class for every hour of class? I probably averaged more like a 1:1 ratio, if even that. No way would I spend an hour outside of class merely transcribing what the teacher said again. I generally took sparse notes and relied on my brain to keep most of the information.
Of course, this was quite some time ago -- laptops existed, but they were big and not really ever brought to class. How do you write down equations and drawings and such when you're taking notes on a laptop?
And now that I'm out of college, the most complicated things I ever write with a pen is a check, and even that's rare, because I use a bill paying service. I do almost zero handwriting anymore. If I went back to college and had to take notes by writing with a pen, I'd probably fail miserably.
Second of all the, Mars' rovers spent considerable time in transit to Mars with no outside protection at all.
As a general rule of thumb, ionizing radiation doesn't usually immediately destroy electronic components (at least those that we've hardened for space duty) when it hits it. The damage can accumulate over time, or it can cause a `glitch' changing a 0 to a 1 in a digital circuit (which can do nasty things like crash computers (which is taken care of by watchdog systems that initiate a reboot when needed)) but things don't generally just `stop working'.
This page gives some good information on exactly what the effects are and what can be done about them.
Third of all while there is some protection offered by Mars, it is still much worse than anything on Earth.
I was wrong when I assumed that Mars had a substantial magnetic field -- it does not. But even so, the atmosphere, even being only 1% as thick as ours, would provide considerable protection. The Martian surface probably gets far less ionizing radiation than a satellite in Earth orbit would, for example.
And don't forget that the Mars rovers are controlled by computers. Computers are far more vulnerable to ionizing radiation than other forms of electronics. And really, ESCs are pretty simple, being mostly just analog components. They should be relatively resistant to ionizing radiation -- far more so than the computer components that control them. So I don't think that's really a big issue -- just protect them half as well as you protect the computer parts, and you'll be just fine. And also don't forget that the Mars rovers already almost certainly have several ESCs... it's not like using brushless motors would add ESCs where there were none before.
Also the length of time that ether a "Superhero" or "Superman" have been around that there copy right would have expired by no
Copyrights and trademarks (and patents, for that matter) are similar concepts, but the laws regarding each are totally different, at least in the US.
Trademarks do not expire after a certain period. They can be abandoned, or can be declared dead because the owner didn't protect them (and maybe these two things are the same) but they do not expire after a certain time. If a company protects their trademarks carefully and does all the proper paperwork and such, they could last forever. Which could create some strange situations -- for example, Disney keeps buying extensions to the copyright term from Congress for Mickey Mouse. Well, if they ever fail to buy another extension, the first Mickey Mouse movies could enter the public domain. But Disney would still own the trademark on Mickey Mouse... and I'm not sure how that would all work. You could duplicate the movies as-is, but not use the characters or change anything?
Either way, the IP laws in our country are a mess.
Anyway, the OED first lists the term being used in 1917 by Greenhill Press, so they would hold the trademark if anyone.
That's not how trademarks work. It's not like copyright, where it's automatic -- you have to file for a trademark, and if you don't, somebody else can. I think a lot of companies file for trademarks for every little catch phrase and slogan they use or think they'll use, not because they really want to `own' it, but because they don't want anybody else going after them for using it. Seems a big waste, but if that's what the system requires to protect yourself...
I still think that the term `super hero' is so generic (or has become so) that any trademarks on it should be invalid, but that's another issue. Trademark law (unlike patent or copyright law) has a provision that a company must protect it's trademarks or they'll lose them, and in this case I'd say the phrase was or is so commonly used that they should lose it, if they even have it.
I saw `if they even have it' because I did a search on the US Trademark site for a trademark on `super hero' or `superhero' and didn't find any on just those two words that applied to comics. I did find a few for things like `Marvel Super Heros', but nothing just on `super hero' related to comics. Perhaps I was looking in the wrong place or something?
What makes you think port 8080 automatically points to a home machine? That's a fairly common port for various server software to bind.
Not really - its one of the 2 alternate http ports (the other being 8000) when you want to get around your ISP's port blocking.
... except that you're both right, and for the same reasons. Yes, it's listed as an alternate http port, and therefore is less often firewalled off. Which is exactly why many services will use it, http or not -- because it's more likely to be open.
Of course, 8080/tcp isn't just about getting past firewalls. What if you need to run a second web server, and 80/tcp is already occupied, and you don't want ssl? 8080/tcp it is! 8080/tcp also has the advantage that you don't need root access to start the web server (in the *nix world, you can't listen to ports under 1024 without root access.)
Actually, they're simpler, since there's no brushes. Generally the permanent magnets are on the shaft that rotates, and the electromagnets are on the part that doesn't, with three wires coming out (and possibly five more for a sensored model, but the sensorless models are more popular now.) Ignoring the older sensored models, the brushless motors are signifigantly simpler than brushed motors.
and require an array of active electronics inside them to produce the AC and modulating magnetic field they need to operate.
Actually, the electronics are generally outside the motor, in an ESC (electronic speed control), but I'll admit that it doesn't matter where they are. Brushed motors use an ESC as well to control the speed, so you've got some electronic parts either way. You're right that a brushless ESC is more complex than a brushed ESC, but the difference isn't really that signifigant.
Most brushless motors are lower torque than their brushed counterparts. (majority, I know there will be exceptions)
Torque is a function of motor design. It really has little to do with brushed or brushless, and you can certainly make high torque brushless motors if desired. If you need a motor with more torque but the same power (and less speed, since power = torque * speed) you either design an appropriate motor, or adjust your gear ratio so the amount of torque your motor does provide is appropriate for your use.
Brushed motors are more mechanical in nature and suffer from the usual mechanical issues, but they are less prone to failure than brushless.
And I disagree completely. Brushes wear out. (So do bearings and bushings, so it's a race to see which one wears out first, but in my experience, it's usually the brushes.) And for anything where you control the speed of the motor, you'll have an ESC (electronic bits) that can fail, but as a general rule of thumb, electronic bits are more reliable than mechanical bits.
Also, traveling through space and landing on a planet that may not have a protective magnetic field, active (transistor based) electronics must be carefully protected against emi that can disable or damage them.
Even the brushed motors will have ESCs on devices like the Mars Rovers (since the alternatives suck for a robot) and so either way you'll have active electronics to deal with. Also, the Mars rovers aren't operating in space -- the atmosphere (thin as it is) and magnetic field of Mars do provide considerable protection (compared to a satellite or something that is in space) against things like ionizing radiation.
This stuff isn't rocket science. Even things like scooters, Segways and electric cars use similar technology.
The technology of brushless was available when the rovers were designed, and I can't imagine NASA not seriously considering them.
I'm guessing that the AC who posted in this thread was right on -- that NASA used brushed motors because they've used them in the past and they worked fine then, so they'll work fine now -- when you're spending billions of dollars on things that can't be repaired in the field, you tend to stick with what's tried and true rather than what's 15% more efficient but not quite so well tested. I suspect that future rovers will have brushless motors, however.
The rover uses maxon's motors which also are used in artificial hearts, surgical tools, and underwater robots
Maxon makes lots of motors, both brushed and brushless. If you look at their web site, you'll notice that most of their new motors are brushless.
As for the list of applications you gave, I'm guessing that new designs of these products use mostly brushless motors now, if only for the reason that they last longer and the brushes aren't ground down to dust over time.
those aren't your mother's DC motors 8D
My mother doesn't need a Rascal yet. In any event, I doubt these motors are that different from what use use down here on Earth. Sure, they're probably built better, with better materials and such, but the general design and layout is probably very similar.
"It is not drawing any current at all," said JPL's Jacob Matijevic, rover engineering team chief. One possibility engineers are considering is that the motor's brushes, contacts that deliver power to the rotating part of the motor, have lost contact.
Brushless motors are generally 1) more efficient and 2) longer lasting (with no brushes to wear out) and 3) more expensive (especially when you include the ESC, electronic speed control) than otherwise similar brushed motors. (But when you send something into space, who cares about an extra $1000 on motors?) I'm rather surprised that they didn't go brushless in something like this. Brushless motors are also cleaner, as there's no brushes to wear down over time. This is critical in zero gravity environments like orbit (nobody wants brush-dust floating around) and wouldn't be so important on Mars, but even so... I wonder why they used brushed motors. Even if they things weren't supposed to last very long, you'd think brushless motors would be more efficient, giving them some extra power to work with, for not much extra money.
(My experience with brushed and brushless motors comes from R/C planes, where a brushless motor is sometimes twice as powerful and 50% more efficient than a similarly sized brushed motor. Of course, a large part of this is that the brushed motor is dirt cheap, made cheaply in every way, and the brushless motors are of higher quality, but even so, even when comparing high quality stuff (and not cheap speed 400 can motors) the brushless are signifigantly better.)
Given the amount of time that people put into these games, I am sure that people will begin to consider legal remedies outside of appeals to the game publisher if they get banned. Perhaps they have no recourse, but as these games grow in popularity, I wonder if we might see legal chances in the future.
`No recourse' is only because the game developers had their lawyers draw up an effective EULA that pretty much lets them do whatever they want. People have already gone to court over stolen/hacked MMORPG accounts in several cases, and while I don't recall how they turned out, it seemed to me that they did have a case.
Ultimately, people put lots of time into these accounts, spend money keeping them activated, and some even spend money to buy in-game money and other bits for their characters, so ultimately... they're worth money, and when money is involved, lawyers aren't far behind.
In this specific case, it sounds like the guy was technically violating their terms of service, or was violating the spirit and not the actual words, but wasn't really running a full fledged bot. (Dunno -- I don't know the specifics, and haven't read the WoW ToS documents.) While I don't doubt that the EULA allows Blizzard to do what they did, it does seem like a warning or some other sort of sanction would have been more appropriate, and all the form letter responses the guy got were certainly inappropriate. The guy was a paying customer... you'd think they'd not be so quick to run him off. And now they've gotten yet another black eye from the case -- first the gay-friendly guild, and now this. You'd think they'd be a little more careful... fair or not, right or wrong, this sort of bad press is probably costing Blizzard real money, and making money is exactly why Blizzard is doing all of this in the first place.
So the best thing they offer over the competition is the ease with which you can switch to the competition when they go out of business?
No, because the competition offers that too!
Really, they offer one thing -- a cooler acronym, SCAMP vs. LAMP. And while I'm not sure about this, it would also appear that they offer support for this, things that generally aren't supported, but it wouldn't surprise me if Redhat and other vendors also offer similar support. If so, then the big benefit is the better acronym.
You're missing my point. You still need to replace all your servers, port your content (which could be as simple as copying it over), and test it.
Replacing production servers either means downtime for a production system, or new hardware to be purchased. Setting up the new servers is time consuming. Testing HAS to be done any time you change config, let alone re-installing the OS.
Yes, and I agree. But you're missing my point...
The amount of work and testing required will be approximately the same going from SCO to RHES4 (a Linux distribution) (or whatever) will be similar to the amount of work going from Suse (another Linux distribution) to RHES4, or even from RHES3 to RHES4, or from RHES3 to Solaris, etc. That's the beauty of *AMP stuff -- once you get the AMP (Apache, Mysql, Perl or Python) stuff set up, it all pretty much works the same, and you can just copy your application over -- you don't even need to recompile, unless your application does more than just the typical *AMP stuff.
Granted, I see little benefit in using SCO at all, but claiming that you're just setting yourself up for a painful/expensive migration by using them is just F.U.D. (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt.) Even if SCO the company utterly folded tomorrow (which is unlikely, though I see little future for them), the OS wouldn't just stop working, and it's quite likely that support for OpenServer would still be available. When SCO finally does go under (it's hard to make a successful business model out of suing those who will 1) fight you and 2) win), OpenServer will probably be bought up by somebody who will continue to support it, and so it's likely to be supported for as approximately as long as RHES4 will be, for example.
As much as I dislike SCO's current business plan, I dislike unwarranted F.U.D. more, no matter who or what the target is. The ends (putting SCO out of business) do not justify the means (spreading F.U.D.).
It would be a bad idea to use SCAMP for a production system only to have SCO go bankrupt a year or two later.
I wouldn't say that.
SCAMP is short on details, but it sounds like it's exactly the same tools as in LAMP... but in SCO. Except that you could just drop your application back into Linux, and it would just work there too. You could also move it to FreeBSD, Solaris, OpenBSD... probably even Windows (most of the LAMP stuff runs under cygwin at least, and there's probably native Windows versions of most of it) and it would even work there with minimal work.
I don't see much danger here. (Of course, I don't see much benefit in going with SCO in the first place, and so I certainly wouldn't do so.)
As far as I can tell, it's just a marketing ploy. `Look! We can do the same thing as Linux, but we have a cuter name for it! So use us!'. There's little danger, as your application would probably port right back to a LAMP system with little effort, but there's no benefit either, because a LAMP system would work just as well from the beginning.
I've occasionally had similar problems with FPS's and games like Descent, especially after playing for a few hours. (But it never happened after just a few minutes.)
In my case, the only thing I found that really worked was to play another sort of game, one that didn't have me spinning around like a mad-man, at least for a while. RTS games worked nicely, for example, since they're usually played from a top-down perspective, or older RPGs like Baldur's Gate II. (NWN might be OK too, but it's more 3D than the games that preceeded it, and it might make you sick.)
I've never played Silent Hill 3 itself, but if it's usually played from a 3rd person perspective, playing a game from a first person perspective may not bother you so much. And vice versa, of course. But if it only took a few minutes to make you sick, I would be afraid that anything even remotely similar might make you sick...
Slashdot Mirror
And really, it's not that bad once you get used to it.
And besides, it was one of the first MTAs out there -- and yet it still exists today. Other MTAs have come and gone, many even using what's been learned from sendmail, but sendmail still exists and still routes a large percentage of all e-mail today.
Eventually, what is the custom will become the definition, and in this case I'd say it's most of the way there already. People tend to use the word average to refer to mean/median/mode, but in most of the cases where this is done, it's generally assumed that the three are the same.
But yes, I do agree with you ... words mean what people want them to mean. But if you give somebody a bunch of numbers and ask them to find the average, will most people 1) add them up and divide by the number of numbers, or 2) sort the numbers and find the number in the middle, or 3) find the number that is the most common in the group? People may not understand the difference between mean, median and mode ... but they generally do know how to calculate averages, and they will generally use the formula for calculating the mean.
In any event, for every human with more than two legs, there's probably a thousand or so (of course, I could easily be off by an order of magnitude or two here) humans with one or zero legs, so it doesn't affect the ultimate conclusion, that `Most people have more than the average number of legs.'
Wouldn't that qualify as two people with two legs between them?Ok, looks like at least Bettie Lou Williams made some good money. Though I have to wonder how much of the money she made Best kept ...
In any event, my favorite example for when talking about this sort of thing is this --
In case an explanation is required (it shouldn't be, but some need one), most people have two legs. A few people have one or zero legs, but nobody that I'm aware of has three legs (we'll leave that joke alone) so the average (mean) number of legs that people have is 1.98 or so, and most people have more legs than that. The median and the mode are both 2, but the average is 1.98 or so.
Ultimately, not everything has a nice Gaussian distribution.
And as for `incompetent, and unaware of it', I'd consider those results to be pretty much common sense, or at least they mirror my experiences. One thing I've learned over the years is that it's not always about what you know -- it's also about what you do when you don't know (know how to look it up!) and most importantly, to know when you don't know. It's true that most of the really smart people I know know lots of things, but they also know what they don't know.
As for Jerry Taylor, I can understand him not understanding the message he found on the web page. Yes, it's there in relatively plain English, but people do make mistakes. But really, if somebody responds to you politely and points out that they're not to blame and that somebody else is, perhaps you should at least consider that they might be telling the truth and check into that before continuing the tirade. And his `apology' (I use the term lightly here) at the end (the site is down, but I read it earlier ... it was `it's unfortunate that it took all these accusations to get to the truth' or
something like that) ... if there was ever any doubt before, it tells us a lot about how Jerry responds to people who point out his mistakes. Jerry may have welcomed the publicity then, but I doubt he does now. I wonder if he even has a job anymore.
A 400 mile drop would do it, however. Can you find a 400 mile high hill, somewhere where there's no air resistance?
Apparantly the term tachyon is also used to describe constructs with imaginary mass (another interpitation of the same equations.) In any event, it's all theories for now, with little way to prove/corroborate or disprove them at this time.
In case it wasn't clear, that was a joke. When the Enterprise hits warp one, colored trails are left (usually by the sharp edges of the ship), the ship goes off the screen in a hurry, and a commercial almost always follows. I never really paid much attention to the techo-babble.Either way, the NASA article is silly, and I'm surprised that somebody even bothered to write it. The idea of the effects involved are certainly sound, but the combination is silly. The idea of this radiation somehow counteracting the reduced aging? More likely is that you wouldn't age faster, you'd just die of cancer (if slow) or radiation poisoning (if fast.) You'd still be a young man, but still dead from radiation poisioning.
The effects of relativity have been measured experimentally. Atomic clocks put onto planes and flown around the world have been found to run very slightly slower, and subatomic particles that are known to last for X picoseconds have been found to last much longer when zipping about at 0.999c. Neat stuff -- coming up with theories like this is one thing, but actually showing the effects in the real world -- that's what's really neat.
In any event, general relativity basically says that reaching 1 c is impossible. It doesn't say that you can't go faster than that (tachyons supposedly spend their entire life above the speed of light) -- it just says that matter can't go exactly the speed of light. As for what exactly happens at warp one, you'll have to ask Gene Roddenbery for the specifics, but from what I can tell, time continues normally, but your ship goes off really fast, leaving colored trails behind it, and a commercial usually follows very quickly.
As for the situation of a guy travelling at 0.99999c for a while and then coming back to Earth at the same speed, the two trips do NOT cancel out. The difference is that the traveller was accelerated to that speed, then deaccelerated until he stopped relative to the Earth, and then accelerated back to 0.99999c in the opposite direction, and then deaccelerated again (we hope) when he reached the Earth. You can't just magically reach a given speed -- you have to be accelerated to that speed, and that's where the situation of the traveller is not the same as the situation of the Earth.
1) warp 1 is usually considered to be the speed of light, not 1/2 c.2) time dialation is not linear. At 0.5 c, time would be slowed by a factor of 1/sqrt(1-0.5**2) or only about 15%, not 50%.
Seems to me the most effective method would be to go to class, take sparse notes (by hand or on computer, whatever works) and buy the professionally done notes from whatever service makes them, if available.
Personally, I was a bad student in college. I generally went to class, but I still missed quite a bit, and I was bad about studying and doing homework. I did OK because I was smart, not because I worked hard. They say that you're supposed to spend 3 hours outside of class for every hour of class? I probably averaged more like a 1:1 ratio, if even that. No way would I spend an hour outside of class merely transcribing what the teacher said again. I generally took sparse notes and relied on my brain to keep most of the information.
Of course, this was quite some time ago -- laptops existed, but they were big and not really ever brought to class. How do you write down equations and drawings and such when you're taking notes on a laptop?
And now that I'm out of college, the most complicated things I ever write with a pen is a check, and even that's rare, because I use a bill paying service. I do almost zero handwriting anymore. If I went back to college and had to take notes by writing with a pen, I'd probably fail miserably.
Ok, enough rambling :)
This page gives some good information on exactly what the effects are and what can be done about them.
I was wrong when I assumed that Mars had a substantial magnetic field -- it does not. But even so, the atmosphere, even being only 1% as thick as ours, would provide considerable protection. The Martian surface probably gets far less ionizing radiation than a satellite in Earth orbit would, for example.And don't forget that the Mars rovers are controlled by computers. Computers are far more vulnerable to ionizing radiation than other forms of electronics. And really, ESCs are pretty simple, being mostly just analog components. They should be relatively resistant to ionizing radiation -- far more so than the computer components that control them. So I don't think that's really a big issue -- just protect them half as well as you protect the computer parts, and you'll be just fine. And also don't forget that the Mars rovers already almost certainly have several ESCs ... it's not like using brushless motors would add ESCs where there were none before.
Trademarks do not expire after a certain period. They can be abandoned, or can be declared dead because the owner didn't protect them (and maybe these two things are the same) but they do not expire after a certain time. If a company protects their trademarks carefully and does all the proper paperwork and such, they could last forever. Which could create some strange situations -- for example, Disney keeps buying extensions to the copyright term from Congress for Mickey Mouse. Well, if they ever fail to buy another extension, the first Mickey Mouse movies could enter the public domain. But Disney would still own the trademark on Mickey Mouse ... and I'm not sure how that would all work. You could duplicate the movies as-is, but not use the characters or change anything?
Either way, the IP laws in our country are a mess.
I still think that the term `super hero' is so generic (or has become so) that any trademarks on it should be invalid, but that's another issue. Trademark law (unlike patent or copyright law) has a provision that a company must protect it's trademarks or they'll lose them, and in this case I'd say the phrase was or is so commonly used that they should lose it, if they even have it.
I saw `if they even have it' because I did a search on the US Trademark site for a trademark on `super hero' or `superhero' and didn't find any on just those two words that applied to comics. I did find a few for things like `Marvel Super Heros', but nothing just on `super hero' related to comics. Perhaps I was looking in the wrong place or something?
Of course, 8080/tcp isn't just about getting past firewalls. What if you need to run a second web server, and 80/tcp is already occupied, and you don't want ssl? 8080/tcp it is! 8080/tcp also has the advantage that you don't need root access to start the web server (in the *nix world, you can't listen to ports under 1024 without root access.)
This stuff isn't rocket science. Even things like scooters, Segways and electric cars use similar technology.
I'm guessing that the AC who posted in this thread was right on -- that NASA used brushed motors because they've used them in the past and they worked fine then, so they'll work fine now -- when you're spending billions of dollars on things that can't be repaired in the field, you tend to stick with what's tried and true rather than what's 15% more efficient but not quite so well tested. I suspect that future rovers will have brushless motors, however.As for the list of applications you gave, I'm guessing that new designs of these products use mostly brushless motors now, if only for the reason that they last longer and the brushes aren't ground down to dust over time.
My mother doesn't need a Rascal yet. In any event, I doubt these motors are that different from what use use down here on Earth. Sure, they're probably built better, with better materials and such, but the general design and layout is probably very similar.(My experience with brushed and brushless motors comes from R/C planes, where a brushless motor is sometimes twice as powerful and 50% more efficient than a similarly sized brushed motor. Of course, a large part of this is that the brushed motor is dirt cheap, made cheaply in every way, and the brushless motors are of higher quality, but even so, even when comparing high quality stuff (and not cheap speed 400 can motors) the brushless are signifigantly better.)
Also, the modern remake/game with the same name (but is a totally different game) includes the first three Bard's Tale games as a bonus.
Tie Fighter really did kick so much ass it's not even funny.
Ultimately, people put lots of time into these accounts, spend money keeping them activated, and some even spend money to buy in-game money and other bits for their characters, so ultimately ... they're worth money, and when money is involved, lawyers aren't far behind.
In this specific case, it sounds like the guy was technically violating their terms of service, or was violating the spirit and not the actual words, but wasn't really running a full fledged bot. (Dunno -- I don't know the specifics, and haven't read the WoW ToS documents.) While I don't doubt that the EULA allows Blizzard to do what they did, it does seem like a warning or some other sort of sanction would have been more appropriate, and all the form letter responses the guy got were certainly inappropriate. The guy was a paying customer ... you'd think they'd not be so quick to run him off. And now they've gotten yet another black eye from the case -- first the gay-friendly guild, and now this. You'd think they'd be a little more careful ... fair or not, right or wrong, this sort of bad press is probably costing Blizzard real money, and making money is exactly why Blizzard is doing all of this in the first place.
Really, they offer one thing -- a cooler acronym, SCAMP vs. LAMP. And while I'm not sure about this, it would also appear that they offer support for this, things that generally aren't supported, but it wouldn't surprise me if Redhat and other vendors also offer similar support. If so, then the big benefit is the better acronym.
Digital jail.
Digital deportation (or exile.)
The amount of work and testing required will be approximately the same going from SCO to RHES4 (a Linux distribution) (or whatever) will be similar to the amount of work going from Suse (another Linux distribution) to RHES4, or even from RHES3 to RHES4, or from RHES3 to Solaris, etc. That's the beauty of *AMP stuff -- once you get the AMP (Apache, Mysql, Perl or Python) stuff set up, it all pretty much works the same, and you can just copy your application over -- you don't even need to recompile, unless your application does more than just the typical *AMP stuff.
Granted, I see little benefit in using SCO at all, but claiming that you're just setting yourself up for a painful/expensive migration by using them is just F.U.D. (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt.) Even if SCO the company utterly folded tomorrow (which is unlikely, though I see little future for them), the OS wouldn't just stop working, and it's quite likely that support for OpenServer would still be available. When SCO finally does go under (it's hard to make a successful business model out of suing those who will 1) fight you and 2) win), OpenServer will probably be bought up by somebody who will continue to support it, and so it's likely to be supported for as approximately as long as RHES4 will be, for example.
As much as I dislike SCO's current business plan, I dislike unwarranted F.U.D. more, no matter who or what the target is. The ends (putting SCO out of business) do not justify the means (spreading F.U.D.).
SCAMP is short on details, but it sounds like it's exactly the same tools as in LAMP ... but in SCO. Except that you could just drop your application back into Linux, and it would just work there too. You could also move it to FreeBSD, Solaris, OpenBSD ... probably even Windows (most of the LAMP stuff runs under cygwin at least, and there's probably native Windows versions of most of it) and it would even work there with minimal work.
I don't see much danger here. (Of course, I don't see much benefit in going with SCO in the first place, and so I certainly wouldn't do so.)
As far as I can tell, it's just a marketing ploy. `Look! We can do the same thing as Linux, but we have a cuter name for it! So use us!'. There's little danger, as your application would probably port right back to a LAMP system with little effort, but there's no benefit either, because a LAMP system would work just as well from the beginning.
In my case, the only thing I found that really worked was to play another sort of game, one that didn't have me spinning around like a mad-man, at least for a while. RTS games worked nicely, for example, since they're usually played from a top-down perspective, or older RPGs like Baldur's Gate II. (NWN might be OK too, but it's more 3D than the games that preceeded it, and it might make you sick.)
I've never played Silent Hill 3 itself, but if it's usually played from a 3rd person perspective, playing a game from a first person perspective may not bother you so much. And vice versa, of course. But if it only took a few minutes to make you sick, I would be afraid that anything even remotely similar might make you sick ...