It makes me wonder if we really need a lunar presence though, could we use something like ISS as a hopping point, instead of the moon? It seems wasteful, unless we really can somehow squeeze fuel from regolith, which I hear is possible, but only if we actually can find water up there, which is at the moment only speculation.
ISS's size is limited to how much material you can haul to orbit, as well as structural constraints. Moonbases size is limited by how much rock you can dig (I'm assuming an underground base, obviously). A moonbase can easily be made big enough to host thousands of people, while ISS can't.
I'm not sure... Wouldn't a straight mars hop be easier? Mars is still the goal, no?
IMHO the goal should be to get a permanent, sustainable presence in space, with an eye towards colonization, rather than a one-off visit to yet another dead rock to show how great some nation or leader is.
Yeah, I really want to submit users to random hangs while the Java VM garbage collects itself. Not to mention that yes, speed does matter, so until you can actually show some evidence of real-life shrink-wrapped applications running just as fast on a VM as on the metal, I think we'll stick with C++ (trust me, repagination is a lot of work, and it's already bad enough in long documents).
Given the choice between random sub-second hangs and random crashes with occassional virus infection, I'll take the former any day. Besides, modern VMs compile everything to machine code prior to execution (JIT), so there shouldn't be any significant speed penalty to them - and there isn't, as far as I can tell.
And if you think Word's too complex and shouldn't be doing that much work, you know where to find notepad (or vi), but good luck making professional documents; I'm fairly certain that most of our 500 million customers will stick with Word.
I guess they'll be seeing a lot of exploits in the future too, then.
Given the fact that human beings haven't stopped evolving, if we divide ourselves among two planets (let's say a terraformed Mars) and don't interbreed for a long period of time then surely speciation will eventually happen.
Speciation didn't happen on Earth for all the tens of thousand of years the various human populations lived in complete separation, even without modern medical technology. It takes millions of years at minimum. And why do you assume that interbreeding wouldn't happen ? Clearly there must be a way of moving lots of people to Moon if we can colonize it in the first place, and it's easier to get back to Earth - it's downhill, as far as gravity is concerned. This is especially true in the timeframe required for speciation (or even for a new race to be born) due to constantly improving technology.
The way I see it there are three things we can do:
Number four is to improve technology to the point where there is a substantial flow of people between Earth and Moon. Since Moon is currently uninhabited and uninhabitable, this is a requirement for it to be colonized in the first place.
The usual reason - a local buffer created from the stack set to a fixed size.
Yet another good reason to code all future applications in Java or some other language with mandatory (meaning it cannot be turned off no matter how sure the programmer is of himself) bounds checking.
Cue a dozen replies telling how they don't need it since only an idiot would make that kind of error... Guess what, people: I'm sick and tired of exploits and random crashes. Switch to Java and leave C/C++ to system programmers, please !
Crap, I forgot a square root in there. The required speed is 0.9696c. Sorry.
You also forgot that the craft leaves from rest (relative to Earth) and ends in full stop (relative to Pluto, but Pluto's and Earth's speed difference is so small compared to the 0.9696c that we can treat it as zero). It accelerates the first half and decelerates the second half of the journey. Given this, and that the journey should still take one hour from the perspective of the craft, how fast is it going at midpoint and how large acceleration will the craft's passengers suffer ?-)
The moon's gravity is 1/3 that of Earth's, so any human beings that reproduce and stay there for some number of generations will grow to be much taller and thinner. They're muscle structure might change a lot and by the end of the human race on Earth, they'll be completely alien
Wrong. Such changes happen if, and only if, they give a significant advantage in the number of offspring such people produce. Since the human hipbone is already too thin for safe birth, and the reason it can't get wider is that you'd have trouble walking then, it is likely that evolutionary pressure would be for wider, not thinner, people. Why the muscle structure would change I have no idea; large (strong) muscles are only disadvantageous during a famine (since they consume energy), since upkeeping them consumes more energy than smaller muscles, and such famines are pretty unlikely in a colony dependent on high technology (if it breaks, the colonists are all dead anyway). Unless you meant the places the muscles anchor to, in which case we're talking at least millions of years of evolution...
Of course all of this completely ignores human medical and other technology, which is likely to render any such advantages/disadvantages insignificant. But even discounting that, let's all repeat now: "Acquired charasteristics are not inherited, with the only exceptions being mutations".
Good fearmongering nonetheless. And, I suspect, a good troll.
Sure we might not launch the technology that scifi writers are extolling, but do we really need a hydrogen pulse engine and solar sails to get to the moon? Probably not, we got there fine with massive amounts of explosives strapped to the back of a couple brave souls.
Yes, we do. We aren't talking about a single or even a few missions, but a permanent base. Permanent base means regular trips to rotate crew and bring in supplies. Regular trips must be cost-effective so it can be maintained even during financial difficulties - and, frankly, the chemical rocket was/is anything but cost-effective.
The Apollo approach - using a single rocket that launches from the surface of Earth and goes all the way to the Moon and hauls a rocket capable of both landing and rising back up from the lunar surface, and finally returns back to Earth surface - is all fine and good for a single trip, but regular trips require splitting the journey into three stages (Earth -> terrestial orbit, terrestial orbit -> lunar orbit, lunar orbit -> Moon) and using a different vechile for each. Maybe you'd use the Shuttle (or whatever replaces it eventually) to reach orbit, switch to a solar sail there (one that never lands but just moves between terrestial and lunar orbits) and, finally, the station would send a lunar lander to get you down from the lunar orbit ?
But the point is: the Apollo way of doing things is not suitable for regular Earth-Moon travel, especially if you need to supply a lunar base.
OO is a useful concept to describe to students because it gets them used to the ideas of abstraction and forces good programming practice like information hiding.
OO does not force information hiding; you can just declare everything public. Some OO languages - like Python - don't even allow information hiding at all.
Anyway, start them from as simple and straightforward language as possible - preferably shell scripts - and then move to assembler and from there to BASIC, C and onward. The last thing you want to do is teach them OO without them having any idea what problem OO was supposed to solve. Heck, before they'e had a merry go with BASIC's GOTO and manually managing variable names in a long program, they propably won't really get the idea of procedures, local variables and stack.
Interestingly universities do not teach, and I think rightly, the most common activity that CS grads end up doing in the real world, which is installation, integration, customisation and configuration of COTS products like CRM systems.
IMHO these aren't subjects for the university at all, but rather for - whatever it is that you Americans call it, the school that teaches the people who build and maintain of pipes and electric lines and such ? After all, installation - and even programming - aren't computer science, they're computer-related practical skills. Actual Computer Science would be Boole's algebra and such.
Maybe it wouldn't be a bad idea to place a small object ejection device on your car. Place it near a tire, so you're just "kicking up" rocks. To shoot objects, use a solenoid. Make it so it tries to bounce it off the ground, and use a potentiometer and a MOSFET to control the power, and another pot hooked up to a servo to control the angle of ejection. Imagine doing the testing so that you can set reasonable values for the pot's min and max..don't hit your own car!
Or just drop some caltrops. No reason to go high-tech when there's a tested and true method:).
And of course this is all just theoretical talk, I'd never advise anyone to do anything illegal, no matter how deserving the victim might be and how many lives it might save to get him off the road.
ultranova they're coming to get you for those threats of violence you made against me!
And to dig myself deeper, I read Dragon Ball & Ranma and watch Warner Bros cartoons - the ultra-violent stuff, that is. And have seen naked breasts in my lifetime. And I even listen to some non-classical music, the horror !
Good thing I don't live in the USA - Land of the Free-Except-When-Thinking-Of-Children, Home of the Not-So-Brave-After-9/11:).
I'll remember that as I'm sitting my seat with chest pains and can't even cry out.
What good would a cell phone do to you, then ? If you can't speak or otherwise get the attention of people sitting right next to you, how the heck are you going to call 911 and make them understand you're having a heart attack ?
Banning the few assholes would seem to be much more effective, much safer for all concerned and much less likely to piss off people.
Really ? I'd propably be a lot more annoyed at having to have surgery performed on my posterior before entering and after leaving the movie theater rather than simply not take my cell phone with me, but maybe that's just me. And I have to admit that it would propably improve the air quality in the theater quite a bit.
As for free speech... I'm not a US citizen, but surely there are restrictions to what counts as 'free', anything that would incite hate or violence seems like it would be exempt from this freedom.
Your use of single quote marks around the word "free" incites me to hatred and, should I ever get my hands on you, violence. Therefore your message is exempt from the protections granted by freedom of speech. You're under arrest, apostrophe boy.
Or to spell it out: there's absolutely nothing that won't incite hate and violence in someone. This is especially true of anything significant (such as political messages).
But the bottom line is that with one fell swoop the GP just undermined the entire US banking system. That's how broadly his amendment could be interpreted.
If you want a loan, first make an agreement with the bank that they can obtain your credit history for the purposes of determining whether they want to give it to you, and keep it for as long as this process takes and no longer AND that they can hold the data on how much they've loaned me, when, and did I pay it back on time indefinitely. Problem solved.
Why on Earth should the bank (or anyone else for that matter) be allowed to examine your credit history unless you've asked them to give you credit ? So they can send you "preapproved credit" spam ?
Shame is the single most effective means of persuasion known to man (second is particular violence).
Nope. Sex is the most effective means of persuasion, at least judging from the amount of people who risk extreme shame and often horrendous punishments to get some.
No. Popular with angsty kids who still consider their favorite band-of-the-week as a defining characteristic of their very existence. Most of us grow out of that.
And graduate into complaining about the shallowness of said kids here on Slashdot instead. Much more mature.
Oh well. A few more years and you, too, will be amongst us truly mature people, complaining about people who complain about angsty kids who consider their favorite band-of-the-week as a defining charasteristic of their very existence:).
I wonder if it's possible to become mature enough that I could just deal with people as they are, without worrying about maturity or immaturity, or the appearance of them ?
I wish thinking was one of the autonomous functions of the brain, or that breathing was directly tied to thinking ability...
Thinking, like breathing, is an autonomous function of the brain. And just like breathing, it can be stopped at will. Since doing so somewhat eases the pain of living in an imperfect world, people have a nasty habit of doing it.
To be fair, I'm sure almost all 1st world nations have people like this. They just tend to have a larger voice in America (from my perspective) whereas in other countries, the majority seem quicker to tell them to sit down, shut up,
Actually we just ignore them. There's not much point arguing with lunatics.
and realize that 99.9% of people who bathe each day will see at least one set of genitals per day.
Since approximately 0.6% of world's population is blind, and I know of no statistical link between being blind and not taking baths, I'd say that you're incorrect:).
Common forms of entertainment involved public plays in which nudity was very common, a great deal of art included nudity, and sexual themes were present in almost every aspect of society. Sex was not at all repressed in any way, shape, or form in Roman society.
Since other forms Roman entertainment included such harmless things as watching people getting torn apart by wild animals or tortured to death, you may wish to choose another example if you want to argue on behalf of open attitude towards sex. Ancient Romans weren't very nice people, and their entertainment wasn't any nicer.
They also had a very civilized society, even compared to many places today.
They had an extremely brutal society by modern standards. That it compares well for some current areas doesn't say much, since there's always a civil war or an outright genocide going on somewhere.
Now fast forward to Christianity and Constantine. Sex becomes taboo, as well as nudity in the presence of others. I'm not saying it's necessarily related, but Rome fell shortly after.
Rome fell because their economy was dependent on looting conquered territories. With each conquest the border became longer and it cost more to defend it, while the loot remained the same. When there were finally not enough resources to conquer more, the empire was doomed. Add political turmoil and attacks by barbarian hordes, and it becomes obvious why it fell.
It should be noted, however, that East Rome (Byzant) recovered and kept going for another thousand years.
Children, in particular, are especially cruel when it comes to inciting such behavior, though most of them grow up and desist from what would otherwise be considered sociopathic or sadistic.
Having such weak mastery of yourself that you lose control of your actions to a 13-year old schoolgirl is beyond pathetic and just plain pitifull. No wonder this teacher is ashamed of himself; I would be too if I were him.
If this situation required some disciplinary action, the video should have been provided to local authorities (school board, principal, city council.) Publishing it in this fashion is a smear campaign, and I think the parents of kids doing all these postings need to consider whether they can afford to be sued.
Perhaps I'm being a bit too cynical here, but I'm afraid that local authorities would be all too happy to see that their future subjects are being conditioned to submit to abuses of authority. It benefits said authority in the future, after all.
And just why the fuck would you be sued for saying that a teacher is behaving badly in a classroom, and showing evidence for it ?
But a nice try of making whistleblowing seem heinous. "Smear campaign" my ass.
Everyone has skeletons in their closet.
So keep them home where they belong. Don't bring them to a classroom.
People have a fundamental right to privacy, guaranteed in most constitutions.
Certainly. And the people who pay your wage have a right to see how you conduct your job. You don't have the right to be unsupervised in your job. And you don't have the right to keep kids you've mistreated from exposing that fact.
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ISS's size is limited to how much material you can haul to orbit, as well as structural constraints. Moonbases size is limited by how much rock you can dig (I'm assuming an underground base, obviously). A moonbase can easily be made big enough to host thousands of people, while ISS can't.
IMHO the goal should be to get a permanent, sustainable presence in space, with an eye towards colonization, rather than a one-off visit to yet another dead rock to show how great some nation or leader is.
Given the choice between random sub-second hangs and random crashes with occassional virus infection, I'll take the former any day. Besides, modern VMs compile everything to machine code prior to execution (JIT), so there shouldn't be any significant speed penalty to them - and there isn't, as far as I can tell.
I guess they'll be seeing a lot of exploits in the future too, then.
Speciation didn't happen on Earth for all the tens of thousand of years the various human populations lived in complete separation, even without modern medical technology. It takes millions of years at minimum. And why do you assume that interbreeding wouldn't happen ? Clearly there must be a way of moving lots of people to Moon if we can colonize it in the first place, and it's easier to get back to Earth - it's downhill, as far as gravity is concerned. This is especially true in the timeframe required for speciation (or even for a new race to be born) due to constantly improving technology.
Number four is to improve technology to the point where there is a substantial flow of people between Earth and Moon. Since Moon is currently uninhabited and uninhabitable, this is a requirement for it to be colonized in the first place.
Yet another good reason to code all future applications in Java or some other language with mandatory (meaning it cannot be turned off no matter how sure the programmer is of himself) bounds checking.
Cue a dozen replies telling how they don't need it since only an idiot would make that kind of error... Guess what, people: I'm sick and tired of exploits and random crashes. Switch to Java and leave C/C++ to system programmers, please !
A broken lock is a broken lock even if no one takes advantage of that fact.
You also forgot that the craft leaves from rest (relative to Earth) and ends in full stop (relative to Pluto, but Pluto's and Earth's speed difference is so small compared to the 0.9696c that we can treat it as zero). It accelerates the first half and decelerates the second half of the journey. Given this, and that the journey should still take one hour from the perspective of the craft, how fast is it going at midpoint and how large acceleration will the craft's passengers suffer ?-)
Wrong. Such changes happen if, and only if, they give a significant advantage in the number of offspring such people produce. Since the human hipbone is already too thin for safe birth, and the reason it can't get wider is that you'd have trouble walking then, it is likely that evolutionary pressure would be for wider, not thinner, people. Why the muscle structure would change I have no idea; large (strong) muscles are only disadvantageous during a famine (since they consume energy), since upkeeping them consumes more energy than smaller muscles, and such famines are pretty unlikely in a colony dependent on high technology (if it breaks, the colonists are all dead anyway). Unless you meant the places the muscles anchor to, in which case we're talking at least millions of years of evolution...
Of course all of this completely ignores human medical and other technology, which is likely to render any such advantages/disadvantages insignificant. But even discounting that, let's all repeat now: "Acquired charasteristics are not inherited, with the only exceptions being mutations".
Good fearmongering nonetheless. And, I suspect, a good troll.
Yes, we do. We aren't talking about a single or even a few missions, but a permanent base. Permanent base means regular trips to rotate crew and bring in supplies. Regular trips must be cost-effective so it can be maintained even during financial difficulties - and, frankly, the chemical rocket was/is anything but cost-effective.
The Apollo approach - using a single rocket that launches from the surface of Earth and goes all the way to the Moon and hauls a rocket capable of both landing and rising back up from the lunar surface, and finally returns back to Earth surface - is all fine and good for a single trip, but regular trips require splitting the journey into three stages (Earth -> terrestial orbit, terrestial orbit -> lunar orbit, lunar orbit -> Moon) and using a different vechile for each. Maybe you'd use the Shuttle (or whatever replaces it eventually) to reach orbit, switch to a solar sail there (one that never lands but just moves between terrestial and lunar orbits) and, finally, the station would send a lunar lander to get you down from the lunar orbit ?
But the point is: the Apollo way of doing things is not suitable for regular Earth-Moon travel, especially if you need to supply a lunar base.
Why would a father punish his children for following in his footsteps? No, what they got was a lecture on "How not to get caught".
OO does not force information hiding; you can just declare everything public. Some OO languages - like Python - don't even allow information hiding at all.
Anyway, start them from as simple and straightforward language as possible - preferably shell scripts - and then move to assembler and from there to BASIC, C and onward. The last thing you want to do is teach them OO without them having any idea what problem OO was supposed to solve. Heck, before they'e had a merry go with BASIC's GOTO and manually managing variable names in a long program, they propably won't really get the idea of procedures, local variables and stack.
IMHO these aren't subjects for the university at all, but rather for - whatever it is that you Americans call it, the school that teaches the people who build and maintain of pipes and electric lines and such ? After all, installation - and even programming - aren't computer science, they're computer-related practical skills. Actual Computer Science would be Boole's algebra and such.
Or just drop some caltrops. No reason to go high-tech when there's a tested and true method :).
And of course this is all just theoretical talk, I'd never advise anyone to do anything illegal, no matter how deserving the victim might be and how many lives it might save to get him off the road.
But luckily, at 70 mph, you didn't have time to feel any pain, since it tore your head clean off !
And to dig myself deeper, I read Dragon Ball & Ranma and watch Warner Bros cartoons - the ultra-violent stuff, that is. And have seen naked breasts in my lifetime. And I even listen to some non-classical music, the horror !
Good thing I don't live in the USA - Land of the Free-Except-When-Thinking-Of-Children, Home of the Not-So-Brave-After-9/11 :).
What good would a cell phone do to you, then ? If you can't speak or otherwise get the attention of people sitting right next to you, how the heck are you going to call 911 and make them understand you're having a heart attack ?
Really ? I'd propably be a lot more annoyed at having to have surgery performed on my posterior before entering and after leaving the movie theater rather than simply not take my cell phone with me, but maybe that's just me. And I have to admit that it would propably improve the air quality in the theater quite a bit.
Your use of single quote marks around the word "free" incites me to hatred and, should I ever get my hands on you, violence. Therefore your message is exempt from the protections granted by freedom of speech. You're under arrest, apostrophe boy.
Or to spell it out: there's absolutely nothing that won't incite hate and violence in someone. This is especially true of anything significant (such as political messages).
If you want a loan, first make an agreement with the bank that they can obtain your credit history for the purposes of determining whether they want to give it to you, and keep it for as long as this process takes and no longer AND that they can hold the data on how much they've loaned me, when, and did I pay it back on time indefinitely. Problem solved.
Why on Earth should the bank (or anyone else for that matter) be allowed to examine your credit history unless you've asked them to give you credit ? So they can send you "preapproved credit" spam ?
The public would propably never even notice if stock exchange was knocked out for a few hours.
Nope. Sex is the most effective means of persuasion, at least judging from the amount of people who risk extreme shame and often horrendous punishments to get some.
And graduate into complaining about the shallowness of said kids here on Slashdot instead. Much more mature.
Oh well. A few more years and you, too, will be amongst us truly mature people, complaining about people who complain about angsty kids who consider their favorite band-of-the-week as a defining charasteristic of their very existence :).
I wonder if it's possible to become mature enough that I could just deal with people as they are, without worrying about maturity or immaturity, or the appearance of them ?
Thinking, like breathing, is an autonomous function of the brain. And just like breathing, it can be stopped at will. Since doing so somewhat eases the pain of living in an imperfect world, people have a nasty habit of doing it.
Actually we just ignore them. There's not much point arguing with lunatics.
Since approximately 0.6% of world's population is blind, and I know of no statistical link between being blind and not taking baths, I'd say that you're incorrect :).
Since other forms Roman entertainment included such harmless things as watching people getting torn apart by wild animals or tortured to death, you may wish to choose another example if you want to argue on behalf of open attitude towards sex. Ancient Romans weren't very nice people, and their entertainment wasn't any nicer.
They had an extremely brutal society by modern standards. That it compares well for some current areas doesn't say much, since there's always a civil war or an outright genocide going on somewhere.
Rome fell because their economy was dependent on looting conquered territories. With each conquest the border became longer and it cost more to defend it, while the loot remained the same. When there were finally not enough resources to conquer more, the empire was doomed. Add political turmoil and attacks by barbarian hordes, and it becomes obvious why it fell.
It should be noted, however, that East Rome (Byzant) recovered and kept going for another thousand years.
Having such weak mastery of yourself that you lose control of your actions to a 13-year old schoolgirl is beyond pathetic and just plain pitifull. No wonder this teacher is ashamed of himself; I would be too if I were him.
Perhaps I'm being a bit too cynical here, but I'm afraid that local authorities would be all too happy to see that their future subjects are being conditioned to submit to abuses of authority. It benefits said authority in the future, after all.
And just why the fuck would you be sued for saying that a teacher is behaving badly in a classroom, and showing evidence for it ?
But a nice try of making whistleblowing seem heinous. "Smear campaign" my ass.
So keep them home where they belong. Don't bring them to a classroom.
Certainly. And the people who pay your wage have a right to see how you conduct your job. You don't have the right to be unsupervised in your job. And you don't have the right to keep kids you've mistreated from exposing that fact.