There's lots of great things out there to discover which a computer-controlled car will never find.
Google Earth has allowed archelogists to find whole freaking cities that have been lost for thousands of years and you think that a driverless car will make it *less* likely that you could find something new?
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/01/07/1557216
By the time we have safe, driverless cars, you'll be able to tell your car, "Go out there, to the west." If you see something interesting, just say, "Stop here", or "Go down that road"
What would be really cool for the JWST would be to launch it into orbit and test it for awhile. Then if it tests out ok, boost it to it's new solar orbit. That's similar to what they did for Apollo missions, but for a Telescope it may be too expensive.
Google and YouTube can have minimal IT staff because they have designed their businesses from the ground up to be this way. Other businesses, like financial corporations, have their business rules imposed by Congress and the IRS. Almost every new rule from the government, like the paperwork reduction act, actually increases paperwork and the expences with it.
Like, maybe "cold fusion" or "magnetic monopoles"?
Science runs into non-repeats all the time, but good scientists assume that if an experiment is non-repeatable, it's been done wrong.
Scientists use faith all the time. It's assumed that if an experiment here is repeated sufficent times and always produces answer X, then that same phenomenon will produce the same results 100 million light years away. Most of Astrophysics is completely non-testable, but add a little faith that the rules here match the rules there and viola, grant money.
Often for tax purposes, a company specs and buys a computer then immediately sells it back to the leasing firm, which might just be an arm of the same company that sold the machine in the first place.
Where I work, we have some machines on lease, but the contract stipulates a right to buy the harddrives if we ever give the machines back. Often machines that go off lease are never collected by the leasing company, they are so old they just go to the salvage company.
You presume that it hit quickly, rather than ramping up in power allowing the beings to evolve or leave.
TFA mentions that it's hitting the edge of the galaxy, so some of the planets would see it hit their neighbors many years before their part of the galaxy rotated into the beam.
That's the 64,000 question. Another explaination, is that the initial laser aligns the particles, and when they turn the magnetic field off, the nano-soup creates new photons. i.e. the energy output comes from the original magnetic field, not the input laser.
If the actual photons are being stored, then it should be possible to use a femto-second laser to send a pulse into the soup, then by timing the turn-off right, get the photons to exit either in the forward direction or in reverse.
Rebooting never fixes the problem. Rebooting simply means that you do not understand the real problem. If the real problem is that driver X overwrote system memory or application memory, then you should fix that driver.
If you really understood the problem, you'd patch the driver and put the memory back the way it was supposed to be. (:-) A reboot is a bandaide, one that is only necessary on propritary systems where the details are hidden.
The C64 had Svideo output long before they became popular. The used it for their semi-propriatary monitor. I don't remember the pinouts, put you could probably find them online and make a adapter cable.
So, use multiple lasers each with just under the power to spark the air, but scan the area where they come together from a grounding rod to the sky. You also have to adjust the focus as you scanned, because you want the beam to dissipate rapidly.
You might not even need to ionize the air for it to be effective. Heated air has less resistance than cold air. This is what makes a Jacobs ladder work.
When private information is lost, you want it reported *immediately*, so you can minimize the impact. If you penalize the person who lost a laptop, he will spend more time trying to find it and/or hiding the loss. This is a bad thing. (tm)
The fact that most of his plots were the same is a cultural difference between today and his era. In his time, playwrights repeated the same memes over and over
Imagine a beowulf cluster of Shakespeares. (:-)
In Soviet Russia, Shakespear copies you!
No, I've never seen a modern writer copying the same memes over and over again...
Most firewalls are just a computer running an OS with firewall software as the only application. If you are running CheckPoint firewalls on Solaris machines and there is a bug in the Solaris OS, it's the same as if your Solaris machines were directly exposed on the Internet.
Router ACLs can protect you against OS bugs and rouge applications opening up ports you don't expect. While routers are not bug free, they are simpler and more hardened than a firewall appliance.
Water injection systems are WWII vintage. They were used on bombers to get just a little more horsepower without melting the engines.
That said, imagine an 8 cycle engine. The first 4 cycles you inject gasoline into the cylinders, the 2nd 4 cycles run on water. Assuming that you didn't have a radiator, the heat from the engine would produce steam that would power the pistons. You could even have a computer monitoring the temperature so that when the engine was too hot it would run on water alone, after it cooled down, it would run on gasoline. If this was installed into a hybrid car to smooth the transitions, it might get some extra milage, maybe even 40% more.
Close shave? At the end of WWII, Germany was spending around 50% of it's GDP on the war effort. The US was in the tens of percent. (something like 12% IIRC)
During the cold war, the US was spending 6%, and we thought the Soviets were spending 12%. Turns out they were spending 25%, and they went bankrupt.
The numbers were similar for the War of Northern Aggression. (US Civil War)
The lesson is not to go to war with a country that can build more guns and bombs than you. When you add nukes, war becomes boring. Everyone loses.
Has NASA ever had an accident where 4 minutes to escape is good enough? Most of the accidents that I've read about went "Boom" and was over, long before any escape system like this could work.
Nuclear weapons need their multiple explosive charges to detonate at exactly the same time. So, just get a thytatron and use exploding wire detonaters like a nuke charge. Ebay has several thytatrons available, including some large Russian models.
and maybe later I'll write the the sequel where I talk of the transformation into sellout mega corporate evil and eventually irrelevant blemish on the history of the net
When will the bidding start, and what's the reserve price for the sellout?
Pariser replied, "When an individual makes a copy of a song for himself, I suppose we can say he stole a song." Making "a copy" of a purchased song is just "a nice way of saying 'steals just one copy'," she said
and she went on the say that whenever you steal a song, God kills a puppy.
To paraphase the "Princess Bride". "Stealing. You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means."
This is how things were done in the pre-beowulf days. You'd have a small computer prepare jobs and make them available to the batch processors. You could have as many processors as you wanted. When one was available, it would download one job from the peripheral processor and run just that one, then feed the results back to the peripheral processor. You could even have several peripheral processors, all queueing jobs for the big machine. This was how the CDC 6000 series, designed by Seymore Cray, worked.
It wasn't a bad idea, but it was most efficient on big jobs that didn't need results from other jobs.
You may jest, but that's not a bad idea. The way it would work is this. If you need to develop a piece of software that needs to be as efficient as possible, have several different teams develop to the spec. Allow each team to code in whatever language they want. Then, when all the teams are finished, or you are out of time, pick whichever code can do the job the best.
For your next trick, develop a meta-language that can be machine converted into any other language. Write in that language and have the computer determine which language runs the most efficiently.
I can probably give you the results in advance. For dataset A, language Y works best, for dataset B, language Z works best. Unfortunatly, in the real world, you'll have dataset C, which is unknown right now. (That, and the real programmers would complain "But your meta-language didn't use esoteric construct A.m that would blow away language B."
Another reason that companies don't release their code, is that they might realize that they don't own it all, or can't prove that they own all their source. Some programmer, long gone, might have copied substantial portions from a book or previous employer. By keeping it secrect, they limit their exposure to lawsuits.
Slashdot Mirror
By the time we have safe, driverless cars, you'll be able to tell your car, "Go out there, to the west." If you see something interesting, just say, "Stop here", or "Go down that road"
What would be really cool for the JWST would be to launch it into orbit and test it for awhile. Then if it tests out ok, boost it to it's new solar orbit. That's similar to what they did for Apollo missions, but for a Telescope it may be too expensive.
Google and YouTube can have minimal IT staff because they have designed their businesses from the ground up to be this way. Other businesses, like financial corporations, have their business rules imposed by Congress and the IRS. Almost every new rule from the government, like the paperwork reduction act, actually increases paperwork and the expences with it.
Science runs into non-repeats all the time, but good scientists assume that if an experiment is non-repeatable, it's been done wrong.
Scientists use faith all the time. It's assumed that if an experiment here is repeated sufficent times and always produces answer X, then that same phenomenon will produce the same results 100 million light years away. Most of Astrophysics is completely non-testable, but add a little faith that the rules here match the rules there and viola, grant money.
Often for tax purposes, a company specs and buys a computer then immediately sells it back to the leasing firm, which might just be an arm of the same company that sold the machine in the first place.
Where I work, we have some machines on lease, but the contract stipulates a right to buy the harddrives if we ever give the machines back. Often machines that go off lease are never collected by the leasing company, they are so old they just go to the salvage company.
You presume that it hit quickly, rather than ramping up in power allowing the beings to evolve or leave.
TFA mentions that it's hitting the edge of the galaxy, so some of the planets would see it hit their neighbors many years before their part of the galaxy rotated into the beam.
That's the 64,000 question. Another explaination, is that the initial laser aligns the particles, and when they turn the magnetic field off, the nano-soup creates new photons. i.e. the energy output comes from the original magnetic field, not the input laser.
If the actual photons are being stored, then it should be possible to use a femto-second laser to send a pulse into the soup, then by timing the turn-off right, get the photons to exit either in the forward direction or in reverse.
Ack pfttt.
Rebooting never fixes the problem. Rebooting simply means that you do not understand the real problem. If the real problem is that driver X overwrote system memory or application memory, then you should fix that driver.
If you really understood the problem, you'd patch the driver and put the memory back the way it was supposed to be. (:-) A reboot is a bandaide, one that is only necessary on propritary systems where the details are hidden.
Note that both are version 1.6. The first 5 versions must have had subtle bugs that had to be worked out.
The C64 had Svideo output long before they became popular. The used it for their semi-propriatary monitor. I don't remember the pinouts, put you could probably find them online and make a adapter cable.
So, use multiple lasers each with just under the power to spark the air, but scan the area where they come together from a grounding rod to the sky. You also have to adjust the focus as you scanned, because you want the beam to dissipate rapidly.
You might not even need to ionize the air for it to be effective. Heated air has less resistance than cold air. This is what makes a Jacobs ladder work.
Oh, and get off my lawn!!!
When private information is lost, you want it reported *immediately*, so you can minimize the impact. If you penalize the person who lost a laptop, he will spend more time trying to find it and/or hiding the loss. This is a bad thing. (tm)
In Soviet Russia, Shakespear copies you!
No, I've never seen a modern writer copying the same memes over and over again...
Most firewalls are just a computer running an OS with firewall software as the only application. If you are running CheckPoint firewalls on Solaris machines and there is a bug in the Solaris OS, it's the same as if your Solaris machines were directly exposed on the Internet.
Router ACLs can protect you against OS bugs and rouge applications opening up ports you don't expect. While routers are not bug free, they are simpler and more hardened than a firewall appliance.
Water injection systems are WWII vintage. They were used on bombers to get just a little more horsepower without melting the engines.
That said, imagine an 8 cycle engine. The first 4 cycles you inject gasoline into the cylinders, the 2nd 4 cycles run on water. Assuming that you didn't have a radiator, the heat from the engine would produce steam that would power the pistons. You could even have a computer monitoring the temperature so that when the engine was too hot it would run on water alone, after it cooled down, it would run on gasoline. If this was installed into a hybrid car to smooth the transitions, it might get some extra milage, maybe even 40% more.
Close shave? At the end of WWII, Germany was spending around 50% of it's GDP on the war effort. The US was in the tens of percent. (something like 12% IIRC)
During the cold war, the US was spending 6%, and we thought the Soviets were spending 12%. Turns out they were spending 25%, and they went bankrupt.
The numbers were similar for the War of Northern Aggression. (US Civil War)
The lesson is not to go to war with a country that can build more guns and bombs than you. When you add nukes, war becomes boring. Everyone loses.
Has NASA ever had an accident where 4 minutes to escape is good enough? Most of the accidents that I've read about went "Boom" and was over, long before any escape system like this could work.
Nuclear weapons need their multiple explosive charges to detonate at exactly the same time. So, just get a thytatron and use exploding wire detonaters like a nuke charge. Ebay has several thytatrons available, including some large Russian models.
(:-) for the humor impaired.
To paraphase the "Princess Bride". "Stealing. You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means."
This is how things were done in the pre-beowulf days. You'd have a small computer prepare jobs and make them available to the batch processors. You could have as many processors as you wanted. When one was available, it would download one job from the peripheral processor and run just that one, then feed the results back to the peripheral processor. You could even have several peripheral processors, all queueing jobs for the big machine. This was how the CDC 6000 series, designed by Seymore Cray, worked.
It wasn't a bad idea, but it was most efficient on big jobs that didn't need results from other jobs.
You may jest, but that's not a bad idea. The way it would work is this. If you need to develop a piece of software that needs to be as efficient as possible, have several different teams develop to the spec. Allow each team to code in whatever language they want. Then, when all the teams are finished, or you are out of time, pick whichever code can do the job the best.
For your next trick, develop a meta-language that can be machine converted into any other language. Write in that language and have the computer determine which language runs the most efficiently.
I can probably give you the results in advance. For dataset A, language Y works best, for dataset B, language Z works best. Unfortunatly, in the real world, you'll have dataset C, which is unknown right now. (That, and the real programmers would complain "But your meta-language didn't use esoteric construct A.m that would blow away language B."
Another reason that companies don't release their code, is that they might realize that they don't own it all, or can't prove that they own all their source. Some programmer, long gone, might have copied substantial portions from a book or previous employer. By keeping it secrect, they limit their exposure to lawsuits.
or not.
Are You Living In a Computer Simulation? http://www.simulation-argument.com/