Rocket scientists also made wildly estimates for the costs of the space shuttle and the ISS that were off by factors of 10 to 100.
We'll never know if their estimates were right or not, since congress made them build a different system than the one they estimated for. The main reason the estimates were off is that what they were calling "The Space Shuttle" and what we today call "The Space Shuttle" are completely different things with nothing similar between them other than the name. They advocated a model that was more expensive up-front, but much cheaper to maintain. What they were made to build was something that cut the up-front cost in half in exchange for making the maintenence between missions go up orders of magnitude.
The system they designed would not have required the tedious rebuild the shuttle now has to go through with every launch.
Grrr. Not all the places where the dissmation takes place *are* "accounts" to have an address for. Damn, I hate it when legislators make laws about things they don't understand, and therefore hide impossible premises inside their definitions of terms. I don't have to have an e-mail address associated with a website in order to set up a website, for example.
The most fun video game I ever played was like that - very simple game leading to very good gameplay. It was on one of those mail-delivery discs that came with a subscription to the Commodore Gazette magazine. The game was "Space shove" or something like that. It was a simple spacewar derivative - two players, each controlling one ship, maneuver like in "asteroids" - there are four asteroids on the screen. But the neat twist was that your bullets were not particularly fast, and when they hit things they didn't break them up or kill them - they just gave them a little shove, using appropriate inelastic collision rules (bullet has small mass so it only results in a small shove) You could use the bullet to hit either a ship or an asteroid. The asteroids didn't break up into smaller bits - they just started moving.
The object was to get the other player's ship to crash into an asteroid first. So you either shot the other ship to push it toward an asteroid, or shot asteroids to push them toward the other ship. To make an asteroid start moving at a respectable rate, you had to shoot it several times in the same direction, imparting a little more velocity each timem. To make it stop you had to shoot it several times once it was moving along at a good pace. And of course the whole time you have to maneouver because the opponent will occasionally hit you (and thus you can't take the optimal strategy of Asteroids, of just staying put and not moving while you rotate and shoot. You *had* to learn how to manuever well.
I usually won the game, not by being a good shot, but by being really good at the maneuvering so I was hard to kill. I'd get shoved toward narrow gap between two tumbling asteroids, and while tumbling around and thrusting I'd describe a wacky curve that just manages to miss them, by the seat of my pants. Man that game was fun.
The best games are like that - where the rules are simple but they lead to complex consequences that take thought to deal with.
Are you talking about security or not? Make up your mind. For a pointer problem to be a security problem (rather than just a bug that has nothing to do with security at all) requires that external input can overwrite that pointer, and that requires buffer overruns. Apparently you think that lying about other people's competence makes for an effective argument. You are wrong.
You seem to be making the assumption that the break occurs at the base of the elevator. I made no such assumption. Sever the elevator at any point along the length of it and the bit that's above the sever point flings out, and the bit that is below it falls. The scenario you describe only occurs when the server point is right at the very bottom.
And your analogy is terrible. The string provides the centripital force to hold the ball in a circle and thus when cut the centripital force is gone. An object in geosynchronous orbit, such as a space elevator, does not get its centripital force via the elevator's tension. It gets it via gravity - a force that doesn't go away when you cut the elevator.
These were large systems built on Unix. It wasn't the Unix that made the reboots necessary. It was the software on top of it. The whole package (unix plus application software) was sold as a single turnkey system.
If you sever the elevator at any point along its length, the inner segment will fall and the outer segment will be flung outward Therefore severing the cable with current weapons that can only strike in the atmosphere or maybe low orbit, will result in less than 200 miles of elevator striking the ground. The rest is flung away. So if you moor it somewhere desolate, the damage is minimal (the loss of economy on the wasted project, however, is crippling). The bigger risk is sabotage using the elevator itself to help the sabetour. Imagine if someone plants or carries a bomb in a load going up the elevator, and it's timed to go off when the load is most of the way up.... if the bomb sucessfully severs the elevator, then the majority of the elevator will crash to earth - and it's longer than the curcumference of the equator so that means a big ring of destruction all the way around. That's the bigger threat to deal with.
Assuming it's in a geosyncronous orbit, a space elevator's cable will have to be several times longer than the ciurcumference of earth. If it falls it will wrap itself *around* the equator. So, no, putting the platform in the ocean, while a good idea, does not get rid of the risk of hitting a population with the cable in a disaster.
While I hate MS as much as the next guy, this might not really be directly their fault. Unix systems are often installed with the instruction taht they get reboots regularly. Often there is a problem that is caused by application code not the OS. If you have a memory leak in an application that runs and stays up all the time, it's going to cause the system to get horribly unusalbe in the long run regardless of whether it's UNIX or Windows. While a reboot might be overkill when it was just one application misbehaving, a reboot is a guaranteed way to kill and reset the responsible program no matter which one it is. At a previous place of employment we told the customer to do monthly reboots mainly because we didn't trust *our own* code to be that perfect.
Do you live in the Midwest or something? The entire world isn't all like that, you know!
Like what? If you assume the bits in the US between the Appalacians and the Rockies are nothing but one flat plain, you are really ignorant. I live in the Midwest, but certainly not in one of the flat parts. There's hills here, and lots of trees. Around here the line of sight to the horizon is signifigantly *shorter* than the ideal case I gave of being in a big flat plain. Here you'll typically get between half a mile and two miles, at most, because the land undulates too much. It doesn't take a huge mountain to block the view of a 1.5 meter-tall human being. Rolling terrain is sufficient.
As far as the mountains go, while they can give you big elevations, they also have the problem that they get in the way of line of sight unless the transmitter is in the mountains and you are not. (If both you and the transmitter are in mountains, they just get in the way.) If you are in flat plains right next to a mountain, that can work. But it requires something like that, like exists in Utah - a whole lot of flat and then all of a sudden with no premilinary foothills, BAM a mountain.
1) The signal needs to be line-of-sight to go that far. It's easy to get high up in New York because of all the buildings. It's hard to get a consistent line-of-sight signal, again because of all the buildings.
2) The place where a slow-but-long-distance portable signal would be useful would not be in an urban area anyway - it would be "out in the sticks".
"True that the *nix server could be affected, but it's really due to a compromise on the MS Win32 system."
Yup. But infected is infected.
Think of it as an allergy. Even though some people can die from eating peanuts, I'm not going to say my hot fudge sunday is "infected" when I put nuts on it. It only seems like it's "infected" to those who are vulnerable to something it doesn't make any sense to be vulnerable to in the first place.
If soeone put, say, a bad Word Document with a Registry-altering virus onto my unix file server, it's not infected with a virus. It's merely carrying an allergen. And Windows is the only thing allergic to it.
C/C++ has problems with security because it uses a type of string that allows for buffer overruns. These are avoidable by using different types of strings when dealing with user-supplied input, but many programmers don't bother doing that. Your Implied Conclusion: C/C++ should be avoided because of this one thing. Any other language differences should be completely ignored as irrelevant. There is only one issue that matters when selecting the language to use.
Since nobody could be dumb enough to really believe that, you must be lying, and therefore a troll.
Look at this picture: http://photos1.blogger.com/img/65/1386/1 024/IMG_07 75.jpg
It's a picture of some symbols and numbers, that appears to spell out "404 Not Found". I keep looking for the pictures of these people you're talking about, but I can't get it to work. Maybe it's like one of those Magic Eye things.
You know, I get sick of hearing people ragging on her for her alleged claim to have been alone on the trip. Actually, she never explicitly said she was alone, and on a few occasions did allude to there being someone else with her. And nobody's disputing that she went on the trip. They're just disputing whether she was alone or with others. It's not fair to label it a "hoax" just because people got the wrong idea from incorrectly reading between the lines.
And as far as the alleged "hoax" of the arial photos of the town, the caption on that photo never said "I was standing here and took this photo" or anything to that effect. It just said that for reference, this was a photo of the town she visited. It didn't say she explicitly was the person taking that photo.
There was no hoax - just a bunch of readers who jumped to conclusions, and then blamed her for it.
Re: your sig: I see an even worse one at our local supermarket:
"Warning: May contain traces of peanuts or peanut oil".
Where was this label found? On a glass jar...of peanuts. Keep in mind it was a see-through glass jar, making it obvious even to people who can't read, that it is a jar of freakin' peanuts.
My take on it: The warning was telling us that it might be a jar of fake peanut substitutes, by saying that the jar mearly MAY contain peanuts, instead of saying that it definately did.
I'm sure there's a few other South American countries that would object to thta statement.
Re:Not to self-aggrandize...
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Is IP Property?
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In your ABC example, you tried to highlight a situation where 50% of the people prefer either A or B over C, while only 49% prefer C, and yet C wins anyway, and you imply this is a problem, presumably because the 49% is smaller than the 50% and thus shouldn't win. Well, that's fine except that in order to get the outcome that C wins, you are invoking the implication that not ALL the A's and B's will pick each other as their second, otherwise C wouldn't actually win. This falsifies the premise that the number of people who would have preferred either A or B over C was 50% and thereby gets rid of the reason to complain about the 49% winning.
Yes, if the 50% lost to the 49%, that would be a flaw. But that's not what happened because there was no such thing as a 50% of the people that all wanted either A or B over C - not if C won there wasn't.
Thus, political parties lose in power... there isn't the need for like-minded groups to have a "primary" election
Regardless of vote counting style, there is still a need for primaries. The parties have to decide on where to spend their money on the campaign. A single pick will consolidate their efforts and make a more coherent campaign in the minds of the voters. The only way parties would stop consolidating their efforts would be if they were so weakened that there weren't any parties anymore at all. As long as they exist, they'll want to consolidate their efforts.
* Your other fundamental error is assuming that Australia not being a "republic" has any bearing on how their votes work. A republic can be a 1-party dictatorship, for crying out loud!
Your fundamental error is in assuming that I was talking about level of democracy. Parliaments don't work the same as republics because you don't vote for a Prime Minister in the same way you vote for a President. That's not to say no such vote occurs, but it follows very different rules.
I am not making the errors you claim. YOUR error is assuming I'm trying to optimize the same thing you are. I see nothing wrong with the 49% party winning when there exist portions of the other two that prefer to throw their weight their way when their own candidate loses.
Re:Not to self-aggrandize...
on
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So a system that fails to give a minority what they want is a failure? Remember, for your scenario to come out, you have to assume republicans would vote R->D->L. If that is the case then the system is giving the right result. If the majority of Republicans vote R->L->D, then your problem scenario doesn't happen. So the real question is, why are the Libtertarians in your scenario failing to woo the Republicans into picking them as a second choice if they are allegedly so close to each other in attitudes?
For your problem to occur, the third party has to like a major party that doesn't reciprocate and like them back.
Re:Not to self-aggrandize...
on
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The point you're missing is that you keep using examples where the majority actually do not want the third party to come to power.
I'm not missing it, that's precisely the precondition for the point that I'm making.
Then in that case your point doesn't make sense. If the majority doesn't want X to happen, and then X doesn't happen, that is hardly a failure of the system. Perhaps it's a failure of the voters.
The Pak didn't administrate the ring. They created it and left it for their successors to use. Therefore the Machine People's civilization was the original inhabitants.
Slashdot Mirror
Rocket scientists also made wildly estimates for the costs of the space shuttle and the ISS that were off by factors of 10 to 100.
We'll never know if their estimates were right or not, since congress made them build a different system than the one they estimated for. The main reason the estimates were off is that what they were calling "The Space Shuttle" and what we today call "The Space Shuttle" are completely different things with nothing similar between them other than the name. They advocated a model that was more expensive up-front, but much cheaper to maintain. What they were made to build was something that cut the up-front cost in half in exchange for making the maintenence between missions go up orders of magnitude.
The system they designed would not have required the tedious rebuild the shuttle now has to go through with every launch.
Grrr. Not all the places where the dissmation takes place *are* "accounts" to have an address for. Damn, I hate it when legislators make laws about things they don't understand, and therefore hide impossible premises inside their definitions of terms. I don't have to have an e-mail address associated with a website in order to set up a website, for example.
The most fun video game I ever played was like that - very simple game leading to very good gameplay. It was on one of those mail-delivery discs that came with a subscription to the Commodore Gazette magazine. The game was "Space shove" or something like that. It was a simple spacewar derivative - two players, each controlling one ship, maneuver like in "asteroids" - there are four asteroids on the screen. But the neat twist was that your bullets were not particularly fast, and when they hit things they didn't break them up or kill them - they just gave them a little shove, using appropriate inelastic collision rules (bullet has small mass so it only results in a small shove) You could use the bullet to hit either a ship or an asteroid. The asteroids didn't break up into smaller bits - they just started moving.
The object was to get the other player's ship to crash into an asteroid first. So you either shot the other ship to push it toward an asteroid, or shot asteroids to push them toward the other ship. To make an asteroid start moving at a respectable rate, you had to shoot it several times in the same direction, imparting a little more velocity each timem. To make it stop you had to shoot it several times once it was moving along at a good pace. And of course the whole time you have to maneouver because the opponent will occasionally hit you (and thus you can't take the optimal strategy of Asteroids, of just staying put and not moving while you rotate and shoot. You *had* to learn how to manuever well.
I usually won the game, not by being a good shot, but by being really good at the maneuvering so I was hard to kill. I'd get shoved toward narrow gap between two tumbling asteroids, and while tumbling around and thrusting I'd describe a wacky curve that just manages to miss them, by the seat of my pants. Man that game was fun.
The best games are like that - where the rules are simple but they lead to complex consequences that take thought to deal with.
Are you talking about security or not? Make up your mind. For a pointer problem to be a security problem (rather than just a bug that has nothing to do with security at all) requires that external input can overwrite that pointer, and that requires buffer overruns. Apparently you think that lying about other people's competence makes for an effective argument. You are wrong.
You seem to be making the assumption that the break occurs at the base of the elevator. I made no such assumption. Sever the elevator at any point along the length of it and the bit that's above the sever point flings out, and the bit that is below it falls. The scenario you describe only occurs when the server point is right at the very bottom.
And your analogy is terrible. The string provides the centripital force to hold the ball in a circle and thus when cut the centripital force is gone. An object in geosynchronous orbit, such as a space elevator, does not get its centripital force via the elevator's tension. It gets it via gravity - a force that doesn't go away when you cut the elevator.
These were large systems built on Unix. It wasn't the Unix that made the reboots necessary. It was the software on top of it. The whole package (unix plus application software) was sold as a single turnkey system.
You have just lied.
If you sever the elevator at any point along its length, the inner segment will fall and the outer segment will be flung outward Therefore severing the cable with current weapons that can only strike in the atmosphere or maybe low orbit, will result in less than 200 miles of elevator striking the ground. The rest is flung away. So if you moor it somewhere desolate, the damage is minimal (the loss of economy on the wasted project, however, is crippling). The bigger risk is sabotage using the elevator itself to help the sabetour. Imagine if someone plants or carries a bomb in a load going up the elevator, and it's timed to go off when the load is most of the way up.... if the bomb sucessfully severs the elevator, then the majority of the elevator will crash to earth - and it's longer than the curcumference of the equator so that means a big ring of destruction all the way around. That's the bigger threat to deal with.
Assuming it's in a geosyncronous orbit, a space elevator's cable will have to be several times longer than the ciurcumference of earth. If it falls it will wrap itself *around* the equator. So, no, putting the platform in the ocean, while a good idea, does not get rid of the risk of hitting a population with the cable in a disaster.
While I hate MS as much as the next guy, this might not really be directly their fault. Unix systems are often installed with the instruction taht they get reboots regularly. Often there is a problem that is caused by application code not the OS. If you have a memory leak in an application that runs and stays up all the time, it's going to cause the system to get horribly unusalbe in the long run regardless of whether it's UNIX or Windows. While a reboot might be overkill when it was just one application misbehaving, a reboot is a guaranteed way to kill and reset the responsible program no matter which one it is. At a previous place of employment we told the customer to do monthly reboots mainly because we didn't trust *our own* code to be that perfect.
Do you live in the Midwest or something? The entire world isn't all like that, you know!
Like what? If you assume the bits in the US between the Appalacians and the Rockies are nothing but one flat plain, you are really ignorant. I live in the Midwest, but certainly not in one of the flat parts. There's hills here, and lots of trees. Around here the line of sight to the horizon is signifigantly *shorter* than the ideal case I gave of being in a big flat plain. Here you'll typically get between half a mile and two miles, at most, because the land undulates too much. It doesn't take a huge mountain to block the view of a 1.5 meter-tall human being. Rolling terrain is sufficient.
As far as the mountains go, while they can give you big elevations, they also have the problem that they get in the way of line of sight unless the transmitter is in the mountains and you are not. (If both you and the transmitter are in mountains, they just get in the way.) If you are in flat plains right next to a mountain, that can work. But it requires something like that, like exists in Utah - a whole lot of flat and then all of a sudden with no premilinary foothills, BAM a mountain.
1) The signal needs to be line-of-sight to go that far. It's easy to get high up in New York because of all the buildings. It's hard to get a consistent line-of-sight signal, again because of all the buildings.
2) The place where a slow-but-long-distance portable signal would be useful would not be in an urban area anyway - it would be "out in the sticks".
And your claim for this is based on?
"True that the *nix server could be affected, but it's really due to a compromise on the MS Win32 system."
Yup. But infected is infected.
Think of it as an allergy. Even though some people can die from eating peanuts, I'm not going to say my hot fudge sunday is "infected" when I put nuts on it. It only seems like it's "infected" to those who are vulnerable to something it doesn't make any sense to be vulnerable to in the first place.
If soeone put, say, a bad Word Document with a Registry-altering virus onto my unix file server, it's not infected with a virus. It's merely carrying an allergen. And Windows is the only thing allergic to it.
C/C++ has problems with security because it uses a type of string that allows for buffer overruns. These are avoidable by using different types of strings when dealing with user-supplied input, but many programmers don't bother doing that.
Your Implied Conclusion: C/C++ should be avoided because of this one thing. Any other language differences should be completely ignored as irrelevant. There is only one issue that matters when selecting the language to use.
Since nobody could be dumb enough to really believe that, you must be lying, and therefore a troll.
Look at this picture:1 024/IMG_07 75.jpg
http://photos1.blogger.com/img/65/1386/
It's a picture of some symbols and numbers, that appears to spell out "404 Not Found". I keep looking for the pictures of these people you're talking about, but I can't get it to work. Maybe it's like one of those Magic Eye things.
You know, I get sick of hearing people ragging on her for her alleged claim to have been alone on the trip. Actually, she never explicitly said she was alone, and on a few occasions did allude to there being someone else with her. And nobody's disputing that she went on the trip. They're just disputing whether she was alone or with others. It's not fair to label it a "hoax" just because people got the wrong idea from incorrectly reading between the lines.
And as far as the alleged "hoax" of the arial photos of the town, the caption on that photo never said "I was standing here and took this photo" or anything to that effect. It just said that for reference, this was a photo of the town she visited. It didn't say she explicitly was the person taking that photo.
There was no hoax - just a bunch of readers who jumped to conclusions, and then blamed her for it.
Re: your sig: I see an even worse one at our local supermarket:
"Warning: May contain traces of peanuts or peanut oil".
Where was this label found? On a glass jar...of peanuts. Keep in mind it was a see-through glass jar, making it obvious even to people who can't read, that it is a jar of freakin' peanuts.
My take on it: The warning was telling us that it might be a jar of fake peanut substitutes, by saying that the jar mearly MAY contain peanuts, instead of saying that it definately did.
Most companies with an ounce of brainmatter use it only as a last resort.
Taken out of context, this presents a whole different meaning.
Brasil is a continent.
I'm sure there's a few other South American countries that would object to thta statement.
In your ABC example, you tried to highlight a situation where 50% of the people prefer either A or B over C, while only 49% prefer C, and yet C wins anyway, and you imply this is a problem, presumably because the 49% is smaller than the 50% and thus shouldn't win. Well, that's fine except that in order to get the outcome that C wins, you are invoking the implication that not ALL the A's and B's will pick each other as their second, otherwise C wouldn't actually win. This falsifies the premise that the number of people who would have preferred either A or B over C was 50% and thereby gets rid of the reason to complain about the 49% winning.
Yes, if the 50% lost to the 49%, that would be a flaw. But that's not what happened because there was no such thing as a 50% of the people that all wanted either A or B over C - not if C won there wasn't.
Thus, political parties lose in power... there isn't the need for like-minded groups to have a "primary" election
Regardless of vote counting style, there is still a need for primaries. The parties have to decide on where to spend their money on the campaign. A single pick will consolidate their efforts and make a more coherent campaign in the minds of the voters. The only way parties would stop consolidating their efforts would be if they were so weakened that there weren't any parties anymore at all. As long as they exist, they'll want to consolidate their efforts.
* Your other fundamental error is assuming that Australia not being a "republic" has any bearing on how their votes work. A republic can be a 1-party dictatorship, for crying out loud!
Your fundamental error is in assuming that I was talking about level of democracy. Parliaments don't work the same as republics because you don't vote for a Prime Minister in the same way you vote for a President. That's not to say no such vote occurs, but it follows very different rules.
I am not making the errors you claim. YOUR error is assuming I'm trying to optimize the same thing you are. I see nothing wrong with the 49% party winning when there exist portions of the other two that prefer to throw their weight their way when their own candidate loses.
So a system that fails to give a minority what they want is a failure? Remember, for your scenario to come out, you have to assume republicans would vote R->D->L. If that is the case then the system is giving the right result. If the majority of Republicans vote R->L->D, then your problem scenario doesn't happen. So the real question is, why are the Libtertarians in your scenario failing to woo the Republicans into picking them as a second choice if they are allegedly so close to each other in attitudes?
For your problem to occur, the third party has to like a major party that doesn't reciprocate and like them back.
I'm not missing it, that's precisely the precondition for the point that I'm making.
Then in that case your point doesn't make sense. If the majority doesn't want X to happen, and then X doesn't happen, that is hardly a failure of the system. Perhaps it's a failure of the voters.
The Pak didn't administrate the ring. They created it and left it for their successors to use. Therefore the Machine People's civilization was the original inhabitants.
I don't agree to EULAs. I just walk away, leaving them up on the screen, and when I get back they mysteriously have been agreed to.
What? Do they have a timeout or something?