Actually, the real problem is preventing the temporary cartels that form naturally as part of the cycle of a given market from bribing the government into granting them statutory monopolies, thus making them permanent. Left to solve things on its own, the market breaks up cartels eventually. (The real problem is teaching people the patience to wait a decade or two, instead of demanding a quick fix yesterday.)
Whatever happened to the idea of a gravity-based telescope? The lens formed by the Sun has a "focal sphere" starting about twenty times the orbital radius of Neptune out; I imagine if we sent it straight there instead of making it visit everything on the way, we could get a satellite there in a decade or two. What would its resolving power be?
Reminds me of Marathon 2/Marathon Infinity--back before Aleph One and the addition of a scripting language, some people liked to use only standard game elements to create logic effects. One guy designed a half-adder cell using two monsters, a platform, and a switch, and used a bunch to make a ripple-carry adder that triggered as you ran down a hallway, displaying its results on a bank of lights at the end. Another guy won a Bungie contest by reimplementing most of Myst Island's puzzles in Marathon.
Hmm. Fair enough. Maybe the distinction I was seeing is between undecidable propositions that actually form part of the basis of a system, and those that don't? I mean, Godel's example proposition doesn't actually have any interesting consequences, apart from the fact of its undecidability, does it?
For example the continuum hypothesis was shown to be independent of the axioms of the set theory.
This is actually something I've wondered about for a while. AFAICT, the Continuum Hypothesis isn't so much undecidable as under-specified (and thus has nothing to do with Godel). It's like Euclid's 5th postulate--you can either take it or its negation(s, in the case of Euclid), and derive a different system either way. Or does it make sense to say that Euclid's 5th is undecidable in the context of the other four?
IANAMathematician, so if I'm completely off base here, please tell me.
I wrote almost exactly that spec at an internship a few years back. It was a generic collaboration package, had whiteboard, chat, "email", hooks for writing new modules, even a crappy voice chat (raw PCM over UDP, since I never could figure out how to make the Java Speex module work). The only real problem was that the primary deployment was LAN-only, so I never had to optimize it for internet speeds/latencies. I have no idea who the code belongs to, I was working for a civilian agency in DoD (the Army Research Institute), so I suppose there's a chance it falls under one of the "government products are public domain" rules.
It's football you gits. The ball is primarily kicked with the foot, hence, f-o-o-t b-a-l-l. The abomination that you Yanks call football should be called rugby for wusses or fumble-ball.
Historically, "football" referred to the fact that the players were on foot--the contrast was with aristocrats' games such as polo, which required horses.
Soda is only sometimes metric--common sizes are 8oz, 12oz, 20oz, and 1, 2, and 3 liters. The global "cheap-ass 12oz" 330ml standard has yet to take hold, thank god, except for a few foreign products like Red Bull. (The Red Bull sizes are bizarre BTW--250ml, 12oz, 500ml, and something else--maybe 24oz?)
I heard a snippet of a speech by Reagan today about SDI and how we now finally have the missile defense stuff he proposed. They talked about him not realizing the difficulties and state of the art, at which I laughed a bit when, in the speech, he talked about it possibly taking 'into the next century'.
I found a nice water analogy once somewhere online. Basically a capacitor is like a metal sphere with a thick rubber plate in the center: pumping high pressure water into one side deforms the plate, storing energy.
Can't stand the greedy little bastards. Next time I hear "Time is money!", someone's getting a personal tour of all four of the nearest Tauren's stomachs--visiting order to be determined.
I did my Master's thesis on SCADA, and it's entirely true--most of the industry is stuck somewhere in the early 80's, when unsecured modems, network lines, and radio (!) links seemed perfectly safe.
ITYM if you hook up a safety-critical device to the internet without proving it's secure, you deserve what you get. firewalls are flimsy shields for incompetent programmers to hide behind, and only acceptable in the common case because most desktops don't have the power of life and death over large populations.
Slashdot Mirror
Go read various articles at The Last Psychiatrist for a different (and to me, more reasonable) perspective on the problem.
Actually, the real problem is preventing the temporary cartels that form naturally as part of the cycle of a given market from bribing the government into granting them statutory monopolies, thus making them permanent. Left to solve things on its own, the market breaks up cartels eventually. (The real problem is teaching people the patience to wait a decade or two, instead of demanding a quick fix yesterday.)
Whatever happened to the idea of a gravity-based telescope? The lens formed by the Sun has a "focal sphere" starting about twenty times the orbital radius of Neptune out; I imagine if we sent it straight there instead of making it visit everything on the way, we could get a satellite there in a decade or two. What would its resolving power be?
Have you heard "The Privacy Song" by Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie?
Reminds me of Marathon 2/Marathon Infinity--back before Aleph One and the addition of a scripting language, some people liked to use only standard game elements to create logic effects. One guy designed a half-adder cell using two monsters, a platform, and a switch, and used a bunch to make a ripple-carry adder that triggered as you ran down a hallway, displaying its results on a bank of lights at the end. Another guy won a Bungie contest by reimplementing most of Myst Island's puzzles in Marathon.
Hmm. Fair enough. Maybe the distinction I was seeing is between undecidable propositions that actually form part of the basis of a system, and those that don't? I mean, Godel's example proposition doesn't actually have any interesting consequences, apart from the fact of its undecidability, does it?
For example the continuum hypothesis was shown to be independent of the axioms of the set theory.
This is actually something I've wondered about for a while. AFAICT, the Continuum Hypothesis isn't so much undecidable as under-specified (and thus has nothing to do with Godel). It's like Euclid's 5th postulate--you can either take it or its negation(s, in the case of Euclid), and derive a different system either way. Or does it make sense to say that Euclid's 5th is undecidable in the context of the other four?
IANAMathematician, so if I'm completely off base here, please tell me.
The console .hack games were simMMO. I guess this is the next level of recursion?
C 02 times 20? That's--gasp--C20 040!
I wrote almost exactly that spec at an internship a few years back. It was a generic collaboration package, had whiteboard, chat, "email", hooks for writing new modules, even a crappy voice chat (raw PCM over UDP, since I never could figure out how to make the Java Speex module work). The only real problem was that the primary deployment was LAN-only, so I never had to optimize it for internet speeds/latencies. I have no idea who the code belongs to, I was working for a civilian agency in DoD (the Army Research Institute), so I suppose there's a chance it falls under one of the "government products are public domain" rules.
It's football you gits. The ball is primarily kicked with the foot, hence, f-o-o-t b-a-l-l. The abomination that you Yanks call football should be called rugby for wusses or fumble-ball.
Historically, "football" referred to the fact that the players were on foot--the contrast was with aristocrats' games such as polo, which required horses.
Soda is only sometimes metric--common sizes are 8oz, 12oz, 20oz, and 1, 2, and 3 liters. The global "cheap-ass 12oz" 330ml standard has yet to take hold, thank god, except for a few foreign products like Red Bull. (The Red Bull sizes are bizarre BTW--250ml, 12oz, 500ml, and something else--maybe 24oz?)
Just because you're all commies doesn't make the Democrats right-wingers.... (i kid, i kid)
Ah, OK. I didn't find who you were laughing at clear in your post, and this being /., I assumed you were laughing at Reagan.
I heard a snippet of a speech by Reagan today about SDI and how we now finally have the missile defense stuff he proposed. They talked about him not realizing the difficulties and state of the art, at which I laughed a bit when, in the speech, he talked about it possibly taking 'into the next century'.
So, he was right? What's your point?
You think you joke, but someone's already gone there.
And if you do this in 2D, with coastlines, you'll rediscover fractals!
I found a nice water analogy once somewhere online. Basically a capacitor is like a metal sphere with a thick rubber plate in the center: pumping high pressure water into one side deforms the plate, storing energy.
Feel free to develop a diamond-vapor-deposition module for the RepRap.
Can't stand the greedy little bastards. Next time I hear "Time is money!", someone's getting a personal tour of all four of the nearest Tauren's stomachs--visiting order to be determined.
Nuke the moon!
I did my Master's thesis on SCADA, and it's entirely true--most of the industry is stuck somewhere in the early 80's, when unsecured modems, network lines, and radio (!) links seemed perfectly safe.
ITYM if you hook up a safety-critical device to the internet without proving it's secure, you deserve what you get. firewalls are flimsy shields for incompetent programmers to hide behind, and only acceptable in the common case because most desktops don't have the power of life and death over large populations.
Yes, you're on /., the /. of this end of this decade, unfortunately. I miss the net of the late nineties, before all the fascists showed up....
Actually, I was thinking of the forging, almost 4000 years earlier, back when be was hanging out with Celebrimbor.