it's easy for stuff to get violently flung out of unstable gravitational systems. Just want to make sure: are you certain that you are not mistaking error in simulation (which gets absolutely huge when the bodies are very close to one another) for a real effect? Or, as a subset of that question, does this effect you are talking about conserve energy, momentum, and angular momentum?
I've seen lots of for-fun gravity sims in which things do get flung around violently, but in most cases only due to error introduced by making necessary approximations (and/or failing to compensate well for them).
A blog of the voayge! That does sound really exciting! I can almost see it now...
Captain's log, seadate 52145.7: There are lots of waves out here. There is also lots of water. The boat keeps going forward.
Captain's log, seadate 52271.2: More waves. Also more water. Still on the boat.
Captain's log, seadate 52361.9: Saw a fish this morning. Most exciting thing all week. It had fins. Also a tail.
Quantum mechanics is easy to simulate. Oh good. Somebody better let the Lattice QCD guys know that the game is up. We now know that what they are doing is actually easy, so they can stop pretending they need supercomputers, grant money, and years of research to get any results. Matter of fact, let's just forget them. It's so easy we might as well do it ourselves!</sarcasm>
On another note, you might want to check out this rubric I found for evaluating the quality of a new scientific theory. I think you'd score very highly!
There are two reasons that factories produce better products more efficiently. One is economies of scale (addressed in another comment), which clearly doesn't apply in some cases (see the so-called "Long Tail"). Two is that the best machines have always also been the most expensive. But there is no a priori reason that better machines must be more expensive; it is entirely plausible that some technological advance will produce machines that are better than anything we've got now, and can be made and operated by one person in a small space for very very cheap. It is even plausible that there would be no (or more likely no immediately obvious) improvements that can be made to them simply by throwing money at them. So, from that time until the next tech advance turns things around again, it would definitely be better and more efficient to run these small fab ops in everyone's home, at least for the small time jobs where economies of scale don't apply.
Your argument boils down to "It's always been this way, and so it will always be this way." which is not logical. I'm not claiming that the current generation, or even any generation, of these personal fabricators will meet the criteria I described above, but merely that logic does not dictate that they won't.
So, downloading music is like walking into a barbershop, seeing someone with a haircut you like, scalping them, and then wearing their haircut like a wig?
Ye gods, can we just stop with the analogies already? They are inflammatory, unenlightening, and not even entertaining.
Take a deep breath, get over your physical feeling of rage, and take a second look at that wikipedia page.
* United States: 250,000 invasion--158,000 current (1/08)
* United Kingdom: 45,000 invasion--4,500 current (12/07)
The invasion (when the UK had 45,000 troops in Iraq) was in 2003. Now, five years later, the UK has one tenth of that in Iraq. Not that I blame you all, I don't want the US troops to be there either. I just wanted to make sure that you were not getting all worked up over slightly misinterpreted information. Looking at the numbers on the wikipedia pages for "Military of the United States" and "British Armed Forces", I calculate that the UK has a military which is approximately 12% of the size of the US military. However, 4,500 is just under 3% of 158,000, so the UK definitely does have a smaller percentage of its military committed in Iraq at this point. About 11% of the US military is in Iraq, and about 2.5% of the UK military is in Iraq.
OTOH, you all do have the 00* agents, each of whom counts for several thousand soldiers... If those guys are in Iraq, drinking martinis, blowing up the establishment, sexing the Iraqi women... I can't see how we could possibly lose!
Since the summary (no, I didn't RTFA) clearly didn't nail down a specific timeframe, I assumed that it was talking about the timeframe that I knew the joystick in (and I actually thought, from talking to my friends who gamed, that it was fairly heavily used during that timeframe). So apparently, no, I don't know the particular segment of joystick history that you wish to discuss. So sorry I can't join your club. Have a nice day!
!! My parents didn't buy a computer until about 1990, and then we didn't start connecting to the internet until 1996 or so. I'm talking about games like Designasaurus, Commander Keen, Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure, Knights of the Sky, etc. Single player, not-networked games which benefitted from having an analog stick (by allowing you to move slowly or more quickly, in most cases).
Fair enough. If most people think "digital joystick" when they think of a joystick, then it is absolutely no wonder that the joystick has all but disappeared... What possible use could such an elaborate method for pressing combinations of the four arrow keys have? Analog joysticks (not limited to, but including, thumbsticks) on the other hand, do have a quite wide range of uses, and it is no surprise to find them in wide use today (primarily as thumbsticks, obviously).
I think you (and my GP) are misunderstanding him rather badly. Almost all instances of a "security hole" are bugs in code, not ports or file permissions or other things that you can simply "close" at will and without too much effort. Hence my mockery of the suggestion that we close everything, and only whitelist what we need. This implies that we should write code without bugs, and then only put in bugs that we actually need.
Re:Does he realize what he'd have to do on corrupt
on
Lessig For Congress?
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· Score: 2, Funny
Nobody expects the OFFICES OF THE INSPECTOR GENERAL! Our chief weapon is root access. Root access and non-possibility of non-cooperation... Our TWO chief weapons are root access, non-possibility of non-cooperation, and 12-year terms THREE! Our three main weapons are root access, non-possibility of non-cooperation, 12-year terms, and no accountability... Our four... Among our chief weaponry are such diverse elements as root access, non-possibility of non-cooperation, 12-year terms, no accountability to the executive, and automatic criminal guilt of obstruction.. of.. justice... I'll come in again.
The difference is one of precision. You can move your hand an eighth of an inch to the right on the joystick for a very small, very precise adjustment. Can you really reliably adjust your thumb position by 1/32 of an inch? (using your ratio of one inch to one quarter inch, although I think that the ratio is closer to 4 inches to one quarter inch...)
So, what you're saying is that we should all just quit putting bugs in our software in the first place? That's brilliant! I wonder why nobody ever thought of it before . . .
Will "Science and Technology" or "Greater Transparency" lower federal expenditures? Probably... If you have real good transparency in, eg, the federal budget, then passing loads of pork as riders on decent bills becomes a little more difficult. If we could cut out all the pork, we'd put a pretty big hole in the deficit.
Slow as compared to what? A webpage with tonnes of javascript? Hardly. X11 will certainly work better than some web based crap. Not in my experience. Perhaps you will tell me that something was simply set up poorly, but I'm quite accustomed to waiting on the order of minutes for a single click to travel from my X server to the machine running the client and then for the client to do something, and send back a visible update. javascript/AJAX apps are not even in the ballpark of that bad.
If the commentator on our local classical station is to be believed (and they typically are), Beethoven paid for many of his orchestras out of his own pocket, especially when working on his last few symphonies.
GP didn't say that no bands were as good as Led Zeppelin. GP said that a band as good as Led Zeppelin could very well get off the ground and become famous without any help from the record labels at all, just like Led Zeppelin did. Did your personal favs do that? If so, excellent, they are more role models for future bands. If not, then that does not mean that they are not good bands, merely that they became famous with help from the labels that they (maybe) didn't need.
Oy, somebody has never heard of Just-In-Time compilation, which Sun's Hotspot JVM brought to the mainstream (it certainly had existed previously, but not in any Languages for the Masses, to use Paul Graham's phrase...). No, of course javac doesn't do it. That's not the point.
Slashdot Mirror
I've seen lots of for-fun gravity sims in which things do get flung around violently, but in most cases only due to error introduced by making necessary approximations (and/or failing to compensate well for them).
No, they are going to pilot the spacecraft.
Captain's log, seadate 52145.7: There are lots of waves out here. There is also lots of water. The boat keeps going forward.
Captain's log, seadate 52271.2: More waves. Also more water. Still on the boat.
Captain's log, seadate 52361.9: Saw a fish this morning. Most exciting thing all week. It had fins. Also a tail.
On another note, you might want to check out this rubric I found for evaluating the quality of a new scientific theory. I think you'd score very highly!
There are two reasons that factories produce better products more efficiently. One is economies of scale (addressed in another comment), which clearly doesn't apply in some cases (see the so-called "Long Tail"). Two is that the best machines have always also been the most expensive. But there is no a priori reason that better machines must be more expensive; it is entirely plausible that some technological advance will produce machines that are better than anything we've got now, and can be made and operated by one person in a small space for very very cheap. It is even plausible that there would be no (or more likely no immediately obvious) improvements that can be made to them simply by throwing money at them. So, from that time until the next tech advance turns things around again, it would definitely be better and more efficient to run these small fab ops in everyone's home, at least for the small time jobs where economies of scale don't apply.
Your argument boils down to "It's always been this way, and so it will always be this way." which is not logical. I'm not claiming that the current generation, or even any generation, of these personal fabricators will meet the criteria I described above, but merely that logic does not dictate that they won't.
Well then you'd certainly have lost the data after a couple of hours, wouldn't you?
So, downloading music is like walking into a barbershop, seeing someone with a haircut you like, scalping them, and then wearing their haircut like a wig?
Ye gods, can we just stop with the analogies already? They are inflammatory, unenlightening, and not even entertaining.
Take a deep breath, get over your physical feeling of rage, and take a second look at that wikipedia page.
* United States: 250,000 invasion--158,000 current (1/08)
* United Kingdom: 45,000 invasion--4,500 current (12/07)
The invasion (when the UK had 45,000 troops in Iraq) was in 2003. Now, five years later, the UK has one tenth of that in Iraq. Not that I blame you all, I don't want the US troops to be there either. I just wanted to make sure that you were not getting all worked up over slightly misinterpreted information. Looking at the numbers on the wikipedia pages for "Military of the United States" and "British Armed Forces", I calculate that the UK has a military which is approximately 12% of the size of the US military. However, 4,500 is just under 3% of 158,000, so the UK definitely does have a smaller percentage of its military committed in Iraq at this point. About 11% of the US military is in Iraq, and about 2.5% of the UK military is in Iraq.
OTOH, you all do have the 00* agents, each of whom counts for several thousand soldiers... If those guys are in Iraq, drinking martinis, blowing up the establishment, sexing the Iraqi women... I can't see how we could possibly lose!
Since the summary (no, I didn't RTFA) clearly didn't nail down a specific timeframe, I assumed that it was talking about the timeframe that I knew the joystick in (and I actually thought, from talking to my friends who gamed, that it was fairly heavily used during that timeframe). So apparently, no, I don't know the particular segment of joystick history that you wish to discuss. So sorry I can't join your club. Have a nice day!
!! My parents didn't buy a computer until about 1990, and then we didn't start connecting to the internet until 1996 or so. I'm talking about games like Designasaurus, Commander Keen, Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure, Knights of the Sky, etc. Single player, not-networked games which benefitted from having an analog stick (by allowing you to move slowly or more quickly, in most cases).
Most of the games that I played during that decade were on an analog stick connected to my parents' PC. That's what I did in the meantime...
Fair enough. If most people think "digital joystick" when they think of a joystick, then it is absolutely no wonder that the joystick has all but disappeared... What possible use could such an elaborate method for pressing combinations of the four arrow keys have? Analog joysticks (not limited to, but including, thumbsticks) on the other hand, do have a quite wide range of uses, and it is no surprise to find them in wide use today (primarily as thumbsticks, obviously).
I think you (and my GP) are misunderstanding him rather badly. Almost all instances of a "security hole" are bugs in code, not ports or file permissions or other things that you can simply "close" at will and without too much effort. Hence my mockery of the suggestion that we close everything, and only whitelist what we need. This implies that we should write code without bugs, and then only put in bugs that we actually need.
Nobody expects the OFFICES OF THE INSPECTOR GENERAL! Our chief weapon is root access. Root access and non-possibility of non-cooperation... Our TWO chief weapons are root access, non-possibility of non-cooperation, and 12-year terms THREE! Our three main weapons are root access, non-possibility of non-cooperation, 12-year terms, and no accountability... Our four... Among our chief weaponry are such diverse elements as root access, non-possibility of non-cooperation, 12-year terms, no accountability to the executive, and automatic criminal guilt of obstruction.. of.. justice... I'll come in again.
The difference is one of precision. You can move your hand an eighth of an inch to the right on the joystick for a very small, very precise adjustment. Can you really reliably adjust your thumb position by 1/32 of an inch? (using your ratio of one inch to one quarter inch, although I think that the ratio is closer to 4 inches to one quarter inch...)
Nonsense. You can store digital information on tape with, IIRC, a higher density than analog audio.
So, what you're saying is that we should all just quit putting bugs in our software in the first place? That's brilliant! I wonder why nobody ever thought of it before . . .
The Jurassic was 10^45 generations ago!!? That means an average of one million generations per yoctosecond, you realize?
If the commentator on our local classical station is to be believed (and they typically are), Beethoven paid for many of his orchestras out of his own pocket, especially when working on his last few symphonies.
GP didn't say that no bands were as good as Led Zeppelin. GP said that a band as good as Led Zeppelin could very well get off the ground and become famous without any help from the record labels at all, just like Led Zeppelin did. Did your personal favs do that? If so, excellent, they are more role models for future bands. If not, then that does not mean that they are not good bands, merely that they became famous with help from the labels that they (maybe) didn't need.
Oy, somebody has never heard of Just-In-Time compilation, which Sun's Hotspot JVM brought to the mainstream (it certainly had existed previously, but not in any Languages for the Masses, to use Paul Graham's phrase...). No, of course javac doesn't do it. That's not the point.