I can't even imagine a practical asteroid evasion plan short of evacuating Earth
It is highly unlikely we will get hit by anything the size of Ceres. The biggest risk IMHO is from comets in the range 500 metres to about 70km in diameter. If we can see objects like this coming we should be able to evacuate the impact site ahead of time. Doing that will take remote sensing (something we already do well) and politics (which we are slowly getting better at).
Managing large organisations is hard. You can't just say make it so and expect anything will get done. Getting even one thing done in a four year period in a large organisation like NASA will take an enormous amount of organisation and planning.
I mean don't (or hardly use) brakes at all. Have a simple brake which can stop you in an emergency and keep you parked. Use the traction motor to bring the car to a stop.
I mean that instead of using the brakes at very low speeds where regenerative braking doesn't work it will just run the traction motor backwards. You lose power that way but you lose complexity as well, and save on maintenance. I can imagine cheap cars being totally fly by wire with more electrical and electronic components. Maybe shock absorbers will be electric. Steering may be totally fly by wire. At most they may have a one shot last ditch friction brake.
I wonder if electric cars will start to sacrifice power to brake without using friction. The benefit would be longer service intervals, at the cost of some power. I wouldn't be surprised if electric cars in a decade or so have a single friction brake for emergencies and parking with brake pads which last the life of the car.
Yeah I wrote travel time algorithms for freeway travel in my last job. The travel time was pretty much directly related to the length of the queue at the end of the freeway.
If you want to get rid of a city council I suggest you look into the manipulation of email headers. I doubt that many of these people have spent much time around sci.space.policy or 4chan. They probably think that "the system" puts those Reply-To: and From: fields in.
We have a lot of coal power here in Victoria, Australia and I have long thought that instead of pumping it straight up into the atmosphere we should pump it sideways into huge glasshouses. They could be built as automated food factories because the air in there would not be healthy for humans. The gas venting at the far end should have much less CO2 than when it goes in.
The people who own and run Microsoft know that they won't benefit from radical development in the product line. Not in their lifetimes anyway. So the engineering side goes business as usual. Marketing gets a boost. And profits go in the bank.
I run netbsd on my servers and on a few older laptops. I also dual boot it on a good PC which my wife uses for CAD in her day job (on windows). It gives me a nice pure unix environment, similar to the OSF Alpha workstation I used to develop on.
I tried to use that machine to back up my network to a USB disk but I found USB performance to be terrible. Now I use an eeepc running ubuntu for the same purpose. I think netbsd suffers in a few areas like USB where driver development really has to keep up with the hardware.
I am from Australia but looking at a map of SF it seems they has a similar problem to Sydney. They really need to kick the military off their prime waterfront real estate.
If I lived in Oakland and I had to get to the west side of the harbour I would drive to the harbour with a sea kayak and paddle the rest of the way. Its just a shame that the Navy seems to control the best place to put a boat in the water (duh).
I use an openmoko with an on screen keyboard. I don't miss a dedicated keyboard with moving parts. My sons ipod has the same keyboard as the iphone. I find it easy to use and he taps out emails like a pro.
the 1 major thing that gave the Iphone such a major push forward. Marketing! *well image too but takes part of Marketing*
I think there is a little bit of clever code which sells those iphones. When you press and drag your finger on the application launcher the launcher exactly follows the movement of the finger. It does it too fast to measure a delay, and is accurate to the nearest pixel. Its a fantastic UI. It behaves more like a real world object than any UI I have seen anywhere.
I read some mac forums because I have an iPhone and apple crap is just as buggy. The latest problem on the new iMacs is screen flickering and extreme chopiness when playing flash content.
1) Don't. Seriously, upgrade installs on OSes are bad news over all. Can they work? Sure I know people who've done upgrades that have gone off without a hitch. I also know people who have hosed their system that way. Windows, Linux, all the same, a reinstall is the way to go.
I haven't reinstalled the two main ubuntu laptops here in at least two years. I upgrade them twice a year from dpkg. I am sure it is the same with debian as well.
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I can't even imagine a practical asteroid evasion plan short of evacuating Earth
It is highly unlikely we will get hit by anything the size of Ceres. The biggest risk IMHO is from comets in the range 500 metres to about 70km in diameter. If we can see objects like this coming we should be able to evacuate the impact site ahead of time. Doing that will take remote sensing (something we already do well) and politics (which we are slowly getting better at).
Managing large organisations is hard. You can't just say make it so and expect anything will get done. Getting even one thing done in a four year period in a large organisation like NASA will take an enormous amount of organisation and planning.
I still think we should go through his pockets for loose change. Best to be sure.
He always seemed keen on any idea which would result in more Asimov books in circulation.
I mean don't (or hardly use) brakes at all. Have a simple brake which can stop you in an emergency and keep you parked. Use the traction motor to bring the car to a stop.
What do you mean by sacrificing power?
I mean that instead of using the brakes at very low speeds where regenerative braking doesn't work it will just run the traction motor backwards. You lose power that way but you lose complexity as well, and save on maintenance. I can imagine cheap cars being totally fly by wire with more electrical and electronic components. Maybe shock absorbers will be electric. Steering may be totally fly by wire. At most they may have a one shot last ditch friction brake.
I wonder if electric cars will start to sacrifice power to brake without using friction. The benefit would be longer service intervals, at the cost of some power. I wouldn't be surprised if electric cars in a decade or so have a single friction brake for emergencies and parking with brake pads which last the life of the car.
Yeah I wrote travel time algorithms for freeway travel in my last job. The travel time was pretty much directly related to the length of the queue at the end of the freeway.
If you strike him down now he will just become more powerful.
But its just like Watergate, on a slightly smaller scale.
from the article
If you want to get rid of a city council I suggest you look into the manipulation of email headers. I doubt that many of these people have spent much time around sci.space.policy or 4chan. They probably think that "the system" puts those Reply-To: and From: fields in.
We have a lot of coal power here in Victoria, Australia and I have long thought that instead of pumping it straight up into the atmosphere we should pump it sideways into huge glasshouses. They could be built as automated food factories because the air in there would not be healthy for humans. The gas venting at the far end should have much less CO2 than when it goes in.
The people who own and run Microsoft know that they won't benefit from radical development in the product line. Not in their lifetimes anyway. So the engineering side goes business as usual. Marketing gets a boost. And profits go in the bank.
Its the same where I work. And its time to go.
I run netbsd on my servers and on a few older laptops. I also dual boot it on a good PC which my wife uses for CAD in her day job (on windows). It gives me a nice pure unix environment, similar to the OSF Alpha workstation I used to develop on.
I tried to use that machine to back up my network to a USB disk but I found USB performance to be terrible. Now I use an eeepc running ubuntu for the same purpose. I think netbsd suffers in a few areas like USB where driver development really has to keep up with the hardware.
I am from Australia but looking at a map of SF it seems they has a similar problem to Sydney. They really need to kick the military off their prime waterfront real estate.
If I lived in Oakland and I had to get to the west side of the harbour I would drive to the harbour with a sea kayak and paddle the rest of the way. Its just a shame that the Navy seems to control the best place to put a boat in the water (duh).
In winter, probably.
hoping I can learn to live without a keyboard.
I use an openmoko with an on screen keyboard. I don't miss a dedicated keyboard with moving parts. My sons ipod has the same keyboard as the iphone. I find it easy to use and he taps out emails like a pro.
the 1 major thing that gave the Iphone such a major push forward. Marketing! *well image too but takes part of Marketing*
I think there is a little bit of clever code which sells those iphones. When you press and drag your finger on the application launcher the launcher exactly follows the movement of the finger. It does it too fast to measure a delay, and is accurate to the nearest pixel. Its a fantastic UI. It behaves more like a real world object than any UI I have seen anywhere.
You are going to positively shocked when you take a look at the hardware that is available for $1,000 today.
Hell I can get old vaxen and alphas for free. The only problem is the space they take up.
I see no reason to upgrade from VAX/VMS...
How about upgrading VMS?
I read some mac forums because I have an iPhone and apple crap is just as buggy. The latest problem on the new iMacs is screen flickering and extreme chopiness when playing flash content.
I have that problem on Ubuntu 9.04.
1) Don't. Seriously, upgrade installs on OSes are bad news over all. Can they work? Sure I know people who've done upgrades that have gone off without a hitch. I also know people who have hosed their system that way. Windows, Linux, all the same, a reinstall is the way to go.
I haven't reinstalled the two main ubuntu laptops here in at least two years. I upgrade them twice a year from dpkg. I am sure it is the same with debian as well.
But because of the famous monolithic kernel you have to choose between bloat and binary size. You can't have both.
Or a current BSD distribution. On old hardware I typically install netbsd. I have tried Minix but the hardware compatibility is not good.