Typical PCB's in production hardware like computer motherboards have I think at least 3 layers.
PCBs tend to have multiple layers, typically multiples of two. Often they are made by starting off with a sheet of PCB with copper on both sides, which is etched. Another layer of resin is added to each side, followed by copper plating of both sides, which is then itself etched. Wash, rinse, repeat (literally).
PC motherboards most certainly have multiple layers, often twelve to sixteen. This is so that the extremely large number of components required can be placed very close together and yet still be routed successfully (routing is the process whereby traces are laid out to connect components together). Indeed, on some motherboards I've seen none of the routing other than the most trivial is on the outermost layers of the PCB.
I often wonder, though, what's the use of making stuff up there?
So you don't have to launch it from the surface of the Earth! I can think of many things that would be massive enough to want to avoid boosting them out of the Earth's gravitational well:
Structural components for non-trivial space stations
Storm shelters for the same
Booster plates for Orion-class pulsed nuclear thrusters
More excavation & mining equipment
An additional bonus is that building extra-terrestrial factories will force us to learn a lot about how to build efficient and clean factories on Earth. It'll be good for the environment too!
That's a big assumption, especially for a heavy lift vehicle that is still going to be powered by chemical rockets. While the Shuttle isn't an optimal design even decades of improvement can't change the laws of physics.
For heavy cargo launches, the best bet is to launch as much as possible into the lowest orbit that you can successfully operate an ion thruster in, then use a nuclear-powered ion-drive robot hauler to drag the load to where you need it. The very high specific impulse of an ion thruster gives you by far the best payload/launcher mass ratio. And of course the robot hauler is reusable.
When I was in 6th form I wrote quite a bit on the subject. That was a few years ago now, and my numbers are pretty much guesstimates, but the basic principles still apply.
As does the fact that it's outside the Van Allen belts.
No, actually that doesn't matter -- as long as you're on the surface of the moon, you'll be fine. All you need is a a storm shelter located beneath a 5 m layer of regolith (e.g. in a lava tube, or tunnel excavated into a crater wall); actually, 2 m will likely be more than enough to keep you well below the recommended limits in all but the most violent solar storms.
See Giovanni De Angelis et al., "Lunar Lava Tube Radiation Safety Analysis", Journal of Radiation Research, Vol. 43 (2002). And you'll be pleased to here that you can download the paper.
Nobody but actual scientists, that is, who realize that robotic missions are far more cost-effective and accomplish more than manned ones.
Lies. Damn lies.
Two well-trained astronauts on Mars could have accomplished more in a week than the Mars rovers have done in their entire mission to date. Astronauts can move quickly, don't need to spend days wondering how to navigate around an overgrown pebble, and if their wheel gets stuck in sand, can get out and push.
From TFA:
People have the judgment and creativity to select the best places to explore, [Dan Durda] said, and coupled with the dexterity offered by on-site, no-delay use of telerobotics in early missions, can gather primo science and samples.
It is indisputable that manned missions give much better ROI than robotic ones, but the investment is huge and all needs to be spent before any benefits are seen (the benefits are spread out over a long time after the mission is completed -- c.f. ongoing research on Apollo results). So manned missions look expensive and wasteful, despite being neither.
NO really, it just doesn't work the way you'd expect/want and when you factor in that SONY made it, not some junky two bit chinese company you've never heard of.. it's just shocking.
I think you'll find that "some junky two bit chinese company" did make it, and then Sony put their name on it. Welcome to contracting to the lowest bidder.
Seriously, until IT has its own professional body that REQUIRES IT workers to be qualified/certificed in the same way as other professionals, its a career to steer clear of.
All the gun-related incidents I seem to hear off are all from illegal used AND illegally obtained weapons.
This is very true. Despite the fact that only the very tiniest minority (< 1%) of gun-related crimes in this country are committed by licensed firearms owners, Parliament seems to always have a bill under debate trying to restrict what we can own legally still further.
It seems that the idea that not every problem has a legislative solution is alien to our politicians. Considering the latest farce: how do they think the outcome of a someone being murdered with an illegally imported and illegally possessed pistol (with hand-loaded ammunition) will be affected by making hand-loading equipment illegal?
I think that the biggest problem is that people are going out recruiting Computer Scientists to design their software, when actually what they want are Software Engineers.
Looking at my university's curricula, the engineering course seems structured so that engineers learn a lot of skills that the computer scientists don't seem to:
design for manufacture
systems design
ergonomics
project management
microeconomics
All the things that are vital for the sort of high-level roles that corporations seem to be recruiting CS graduates for.
The fridge is an inductive load and can cause phase and waveform issues with the power.
-1, Wrong. If the fridge was manufactured any time in the last decade it is almost certain to have power factor correction capacitors. This is now a requirement for consumer electronics and electrical applicances (in the EU, at least)...
Well at work, I am force to use fedora, and I also wanted to use krita, and I also couldn't find how to save or load png/tiff/jpeg
Well, I use straight-out-of-the-repository Krita on Fedora Core 6, and "File->Open->double-click on JPEG file" worked perfectly for me. I suggest you go find your system administrator and give him a kicking.
This is of course a matter of opinion, and in mine XEmacs is most definitely inferior to GNU Emacs, stability and portability being two of the main reasons.
You missed the point. The GP was simulating an blocklist lookup, whereas you just checked that you could get the IP address for the website. Looking up <suspect IP address>.zen.spamhaus.org returns an IP address (typically 127.0.0.4) if the tested IP is in the list, and unknown domain name otherwise.
This might encourage development of a new email infrastructure that gets rapidly adopted by the Internet, suddenly faced with the realities of how much spam there really is in the world.
No, all it will mean is that no-one on a consumer internet connection will ever be able to run a MTA (for whatever reason) ever again, even if they have a legitimate reason to (e.g. genuine list server). The ISPs will just say, 'You should use our mail relay,' despite the fact that it's craply configured and slow, and then jump up and down on you whenever you try to send the same e-mail to more than 20 people at once (something I occasionally have to do).
And the same stupid restrictions will no doubt be extended to business connections as well...
Actually it was two factors. The one you just mentioned, and the orher factor being the factor which you seem to think has never worked: Killing every single one of your "enemies".
So how do you kill every single one of your "enemies" if you can't tell who your "enemies" are (because they're using guerrilla tactics and the civilians you're ostensibly "protecting" are on their side)? Please explain; your "rebuttal" made no sense at all.
The problem is that failed launches have led to vaporized Plutonium in the past. Vaporized Plutonium causes lung cancer and is believed to be a significant contributor in the rising lung cancer rate over the past 30-40 years. Will the package certainly stay in one piece? NASA makes mistakes.
Yes, the package most certainly will stay in one piece. The canisters are designed to withstand re-entry, to the extent that if the launch fails NASA can follow the ballistic trajectory, pick up the canister and put it in a new probe (well, I exaggerate, but only slightly).
Yes, dust containing plutonium is incredibly hazardous, to the extent that if you inhale a gramme of plutonium you've sentenced yourself to a painful death in about three weeks time. However, I would postulate that a much larger cause of lung cancer are the thousands of tonnes of carcinogenic metal oxide particulates output every year by the ever-growing population of motor vehicles around the world. Not to mention that up until about a decade ago (when they started fitting decent filters), burning fossil fuel in power stations dumped hundreds of tonnes of uranium oxides into the atmosphere every year. Once again, knee-jerk reactionism (oh noes, a kilogram of plutonium oxide!) defeats actual science in the battle of public opinion...
I'm much more worried about the millions of litres of very nasty insecticide and herbicide sprayed onto the food I eat and into the air I breathe, personally.
The Pope is a public figure by choice, he's going to get criticism. Indeed, as Pope it's his duty to speak on matters he believes to be true and important. He should count himself lucky that he is the single most widely covered religious figure on the planet. On the down side it means he gets a lot of criticism, but on the up side it means he gets far more opportunities to share his message. It's like complaining that President Clinton/Bush is criticised no matter what they do. Of course, it's the result of being a public figure bold enough to try controversial things.
Indeed, and I think he sometimes doesn't go far enough. Quite frankly, myself and a number of other people I know don't think that he should have apologised for his lecture, where what he was talking about was taken almost entirely out of context.
I would quite like to see the attitude towards Christians in predominantly Islamic countries condemned by the Pope; while Muslims are accepted as part of the community and treated the same as everyone else by the law in Western countries, it is certainly true that in some of these Islamic countries Christians are second-class citizens at best.
Feel free to suggest that Christianity is based around the hatred of Muslims (or any other faith); you would be wrong. The converse may, however, be true.
How open minded of you. You bitch that others misrepresent your faith through ignorance, then go on to ignorantly misrepresent other faiths. Islam is no more based around a hatred of Christianity than Christianity is based around a hatred of Judiasm.
I said that it may be true; my knowledge of the Quran and the edicts of Sharia law is insufficient for me to be able to make a definitive statement. I concede that my remark may well have been misinterpreted as, "All Muslims hate Christians," and I apologise.
Can you point to one case at any time in world history where eliminating insurgents has worked in the end? Where hunting down and killing fervent believers in a cause, people who were willing to die for their beliefs, has ultimately killed a movement, and the hunters have been able to wash their hands and declare victory?
World War II
The Allies deliberately and indiscriminately killed both solidiers and civilians until both the Germans and the Japanese were forced to surrender. Through gruesome attacks on major cities (Dresden, Hiroshima) we forced a surrender and haven't been attacked by either country since.
I don't know what question you think you were answering, but I guarantee it wasn't the same one that was asked.
The correct answer is, "Not one". USA in Vietnam & Somalia & Iraq. Russia in Afghanistan & Chechnya. All these conflicts had something in common: a foreign force occupying a region ostensibly for the protection of the locals. All involved hunting down and killing "insurgents". All failed.
The examples you make are examples of victory because the invading forces didn't bother to make a distinction between genuine insurgents and the general populace. The people who would have fought using guerrilla tactics had a more "modern" occupation been attempted were wiped out along with everyone else.
The reason many conflicts in the past resulted in a successful conquest was because the winning army would be let loose to rape and pillage in the defeated country, until anybody who would have tried to revolt was so busy merely trying to survive that any will to rise up was forgotten.
Just seeing this article, and knowing how a LCD display does have a precise vertical pixel alignment and spacing - leads me to believe this whole thing is nothing more than placing a lenticular plastic lens of appropriate interstripe spacing on top of the LCD, thus yielding three low-resolution displays instead of one higher resolution displays.
Disclaimer: I worked at SLE, but no longer work there.
I worked opposite these guys for a year, and saw some of the early tech demos (mid-2005). The technology is not as simple as you describe, and the boundaries where you can see both images were very narrow, even in the rudimentary prototypes I saw.
His claim was that it's impossible to send it safely, period. Which, to my knowledge, it is not. Those 0.001% of people you mentioned manage to do it just fine.
Fair point. I would however point out that if I was given the task of transmitting security-sensitive material securely, I would go for ye olde microdot concealed in a genuinely innocuous letter. Much less likely to be intercepted, and given rudimentary physical security much less easy to carry out traffic-analysis on. Contrary to popular belief, low-latency high-bandwidth communications can often be more of a hindrance than a help.
Of course, if criticize (sic) another person, or mention that Muslims comprise the majority of the world's terrorists, or siggest (sic) that Christianity or Islam are based in hatred of the other, you will be flayed alive and thrown naked into the Thames. Because in the UK, you only cricize (sic) the government. Everyone else is off limits, by law.
Firstly: I'm a Catholic. We are continually vilified in the media; you probably haven't noticed it simply because its so common. Our spiritual leader, the Pope, is criticised no matter what he does, and lambasted by people who fundamentally fail to understand the role he plays.
When a newspaper in one of the Baltic states prints a fairly mild caricature of Muhammad, Muslims the world over stage mass protests and threaten to boycott goods from that country. When similar cartoons of Jesus are printed, do artists lose their jobs and high-ranking politicians rush to make amends? When the Pope quotes a 14th C. predecessor's criticism of Islam and the men who follow its precepts, churches are attacked all over the middle east and Christians in Islamic countries cower in their homes for fear of the mob. When a similarly high-ranking Islamic cleric himself denounces all people of other faiths as apostates deserving of death, do mosques burn? The director of a documentary critical of Muslims' attitude to women was gunned down in a street in Amsterdam. Dan Brown remains in good health, despite The Da Vinci Code.
Feel free to suggest that Christianity is based around the hatred of Muslims (or any other faith); you would be wrong. The converse may, however, be true.
None of this changes my belief that it would be wrong to subscribe to the belief that "Muslims are terrorists," or even "Muslims comprise the majority of the world's terrorists." Timothy McVeigh, the IRA, Basque separatists... Muslim terrorists are just the new Communist revolutionaries, a bogeyman to scare the witless masses into surrendering their rights. Demonising the many for the actions of the few is neither fair nor just, but an inevitable result of the modern focus on the unusual. Just as the fact that a few priests are paedophiles leads people to think that most priests are paedophiles, the fact that some Muslims are terrorists leads people to think that most Muslims are terrorists.
Never underestimate the power of guerrila (sic) tactics.
And let's not forget that when a government starts attacking its own people with tanks, planes and missiles, it's already lost. C.f. most revolutions in recorded history, but in particular the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. At some level of discontent, a government ceases to be legitimate, and instead becomes something analogous to a cancerous growth that must be excised for the good of remainder of the organism.
Surprisingly, Terry Pratchett gives this principle a good fantasy treatment in Going Postal.
I admit that this might well be affected considerably by underlying cultural phenomena, and also by the level of conditioning of the troops involved; for example, the troops initially sent by the Chinese government to Tienanmen Square during the infamous 1989 uprising had to be replaced by deeper-indoctrinated ones from further afield, as they were strangely unwilling to open fire on peaceful crowds....
Slashdot Mirror
PCBs tend to have multiple layers, typically multiples of two. Often they are made by starting off with a sheet of PCB with copper on both sides, which is etched. Another layer of resin is added to each side, followed by copper plating of both sides, which is then itself etched. Wash, rinse, repeat (literally).
PC motherboards most certainly have multiple layers, often twelve to sixteen. This is so that the extremely large number of components required can be placed very close together and yet still be routed successfully (routing is the process whereby traces are laid out to connect components together). Indeed, on some motherboards I've seen none of the routing other than the most trivial is on the outermost layers of the PCB.
Agreed -- that's why it's best to send cargo ahead slowly (less expensive) and then once it's there send humans (travelling light) to meet it.
So you don't have to launch it from the surface of the Earth! I can think of many things that would be massive enough to want to avoid boosting them out of the Earth's gravitational well:
An additional bonus is that building extra-terrestrial factories will force us to learn a lot about how to build efficient and clean factories on Earth. It'll be good for the environment too!
For heavy cargo launches, the best bet is to launch as much as possible into the lowest orbit that you can successfully operate an ion thruster in, then use a nuclear-powered ion-drive robot hauler to drag the load to where you need it. The very high specific impulse of an ion thruster gives you by far the best payload/launcher mass ratio. And of course the robot hauler is reusable.
When I was in 6th form I wrote quite a bit on the subject. That was a few years ago now, and my numbers are pretty much guesstimates, but the basic principles still apply.
No, actually that doesn't matter -- as long as you're on the surface of the moon, you'll be fine. All you need is a a storm shelter located beneath a 5 m layer of regolith (e.g. in a lava tube, or tunnel excavated into a crater wall); actually, 2 m will likely be more than enough to keep you well below the recommended limits in all but the most violent solar storms.
See Giovanni De Angelis et al., "Lunar Lava Tube Radiation Safety Analysis", Journal of Radiation Research, Vol. 43 (2002). And you'll be pleased to here that you can download the paper.
Lies. Damn lies.
Two well-trained astronauts on Mars could have accomplished more in a week than the Mars rovers have done in their entire mission to date. Astronauts can move quickly, don't need to spend days wondering how to navigate around an overgrown pebble, and if their wheel gets stuck in sand, can get out and push.
From TFA:
It is indisputable that manned missions give much better ROI than robotic ones, but the investment is huge and all needs to be spent before any benefits are seen (the benefits are spread out over a long time after the mission is completed -- c.f. ongoing research on Apollo results). So manned missions look expensive and wasteful, despite being neither.
I think you'll find that "some junky two bit chinese company" did make it, and then Sony put their name on it. Welcome to contracting to the lowest bidder.
If you're in the UK, investigate the Institute of Engineering and Technology or the British Computer Society (the latter is more applicable to IT in the traditional sense of the term).
This is very true. Despite the fact that only the very tiniest minority (< 1%) of gun-related crimes in this country are committed by licensed firearms owners, Parliament seems to always have a bill under debate trying to restrict what we can own legally still further.
It seems that the idea that not every problem has a legislative solution is alien to our politicians. Considering the latest farce: how do they think the outcome of a someone being murdered with an illegally imported and illegally possessed pistol (with hand-loaded ammunition) will be affected by making hand-loading equipment illegal?
I think that the biggest problem is that people are going out recruiting Computer Scientists to design their software, when actually what they want are Software Engineers.
Looking at my university's curricula, the engineering course seems structured so that engineers learn a lot of skills that the computer scientists don't seem to:
All the things that are vital for the sort of high-level roles that corporations seem to be recruiting CS graduates for.
-1, Wrong. If the fridge was manufactured any time in the last decade it is almost certain to have power factor correction capacitors. This is now a requirement for consumer electronics and electrical applicances (in the EU, at least)...
Well, I use straight-out-of-the-repository Krita on Fedora Core 6, and "File->Open->double-click on JPEG file" worked perfectly for me. I suggest you go find your system administrator and give him a kicking.
I imagine you're going to be looking forward to the Win32 port of KDE 4, then...?
This is of course a matter of opinion, and in mine XEmacs is most definitely inferior to GNU Emacs, stability and portability being two of the main reasons.
You missed the point. The GP was simulating an blocklist lookup, whereas you just checked that you could get the IP address for the website. Looking up <suspect IP address>.zen.spamhaus.org returns an IP address (typically 127.0.0.4) if the tested IP is in the list, and unknown domain name otherwise.
No, all it will mean is that no-one on a consumer internet connection will ever be able to run a MTA (for whatever reason) ever again, even if they have a legitimate reason to (e.g. genuine list server). The ISPs will just say, 'You should use our mail relay,' despite the fact that it's craply configured and slow, and then jump up and down on you whenever you try to send the same e-mail to more than 20 people at once (something I occasionally have to do).
And the same stupid restrictions will no doubt be extended to business connections as well...
So how do you kill every single one of your "enemies" if you can't tell who your "enemies" are (because they're using guerrilla tactics and the civilians you're ostensibly "protecting" are on their side)? Please explain; your "rebuttal" made no sense at all.
Yes, the package most certainly will stay in one piece. The canisters are designed to withstand re-entry, to the extent that if the launch fails NASA can follow the ballistic trajectory, pick up the canister and put it in a new probe (well, I exaggerate, but only slightly).
Yes, dust containing plutonium is incredibly hazardous, to the extent that if you inhale a gramme of plutonium you've sentenced yourself to a painful death in about three weeks time. However, I would postulate that a much larger cause of lung cancer are the thousands of tonnes of carcinogenic metal oxide particulates output every year by the ever-growing population of motor vehicles around the world. Not to mention that up until about a decade ago (when they started fitting decent filters), burning fossil fuel in power stations dumped hundreds of tonnes of uranium oxides into the atmosphere every year. Once again, knee-jerk reactionism (oh noes, a kilogram of plutonium oxide!) defeats actual science in the battle of public opinion...
I'm much more worried about the millions of litres of very nasty insecticide and herbicide sprayed onto the food I eat and into the air I breathe, personally.
Indeed, and I think he sometimes doesn't go far enough. Quite frankly, myself and a number of other people I know don't think that he should have apologised for his lecture, where what he was talking about was taken almost entirely out of context.
I would quite like to see the attitude towards Christians in predominantly Islamic countries condemned by the Pope; while Muslims are accepted as part of the community and treated the same as everyone else by the law in Western countries, it is certainly true that in some of these Islamic countries Christians are second-class citizens at best.
I said that it may be true; my knowledge of the Quran and the edicts of Sharia law is insufficient for me to be able to make a definitive statement. I concede that my remark may well have been misinterpreted as, "All Muslims hate Christians," and I apologise.
I don't know what question you think you were answering, but I guarantee it wasn't the same one that was asked.
The correct answer is, "Not one". USA in Vietnam & Somalia & Iraq. Russia in Afghanistan & Chechnya. All these conflicts had something in common: a foreign force occupying a region ostensibly for the protection of the locals. All involved hunting down and killing "insurgents". All failed.
The examples you make are examples of victory because the invading forces didn't bother to make a distinction between genuine insurgents and the general populace. The people who would have fought using guerrilla tactics had a more "modern" occupation been attempted were wiped out along with everyone else.
The reason many conflicts in the past resulted in a successful conquest was because the winning army would be let loose to rape and pillage in the defeated country, until anybody who would have tried to revolt was so busy merely trying to survive that any will to rise up was forgotten.
I suggest that a similar incident in one of the narrower stretches of the Persian Gulf would likely be the spark that set off WW3.
Disclaimer: I worked at SLE, but no longer work there.
I worked opposite these guys for a year, and saw some of the early tech demos (mid-2005). The technology is not as simple as you describe, and the boundaries where you can see both images were very narrow, even in the rudimentary prototypes I saw.
Fair point. I would however point out that if I was given the task of transmitting security-sensitive material securely, I would go for ye olde microdot concealed in a genuinely innocuous letter. Much less likely to be intercepted, and given rudimentary physical security much less easy to carry out traffic-analysis on. Contrary to popular belief, low-latency high-bandwidth communications can often be more of a hindrance than a help.
Firstly: I'm a Catholic. We are continually vilified in the media; you probably haven't noticed it simply because its so common. Our spiritual leader, the Pope, is criticised no matter what he does, and lambasted by people who fundamentally fail to understand the role he plays.
When a newspaper in one of the Baltic states prints a fairly mild caricature of Muhammad, Muslims the world over stage mass protests and threaten to boycott goods from that country. When similar cartoons of Jesus are printed, do artists lose their jobs and high-ranking politicians rush to make amends? When the Pope quotes a 14th C. predecessor's criticism of Islam and the men who follow its precepts, churches are attacked all over the middle east and Christians in Islamic countries cower in their homes for fear of the mob. When a similarly high-ranking Islamic cleric himself denounces all people of other faiths as apostates deserving of death, do mosques burn? The director of a documentary critical of Muslims' attitude to women was gunned down in a street in Amsterdam. Dan Brown remains in good health, despite The Da Vinci Code.
Feel free to suggest that Christianity is based around the hatred of Muslims (or any other faith); you would be wrong. The converse may, however, be true.
None of this changes my belief that it would be wrong to subscribe to the belief that "Muslims are terrorists," or even "Muslims comprise the majority of the world's terrorists." Timothy McVeigh, the IRA, Basque separatists... Muslim terrorists are just the new Communist revolutionaries, a bogeyman to scare the witless masses into surrendering their rights. Demonising the many for the actions of the few is neither fair nor just, but an inevitable result of the modern focus on the unusual. Just as the fact that a few priests are paedophiles leads people to think that most priests are paedophiles, the fact that some Muslims are terrorists leads people to think that most Muslims are terrorists.
And let's not forget that when a government starts attacking its own people with tanks, planes and missiles, it's already lost. C.f. most revolutions in recorded history, but in particular the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. At some level of discontent, a government ceases to be legitimate, and instead becomes something analogous to a cancerous growth that must be excised for the good of remainder of the organism.
Surprisingly, Terry Pratchett gives this principle a good fantasy treatment in Going Postal.
I admit that this might well be affected considerably by underlying cultural phenomena, and also by the level of conditioning of the troops involved; for example, the troops initially sent by the Chinese government to Tienanmen Square during the infamous 1989 uprising had to be replaced by deeper-indoctrinated ones from further afield, as they were strangely unwilling to open fire on peaceful crowds....