Yesterday my wife found out that her father may have cancer. She organised for a specialist to see him tomorrow. When she got home she asked me to find the location of his office. I found a pointer to a medical directory site with his details, okay. Then she asked me how to find that address so I went separately into google maps and searched for the address. Google gave me a nice sidebar with a list of businesses in the general area I was searching for including the doctor I had been previously googling.
Now I am sure that my father in law's illness is worth at least a couple of grand to that doctor. Anything which tells google what is on my mind (say I searched youtube for CT scans of lymph nodes, a particular interest to me at the moment) helps them shake down that doctor for advertising money.
Wouldn't work that way in Australia. The Government can confiscate funds which are the proceeds of crime. For example if you commit a crime and make a fortune writing a book about it you won't be allowed to keep the money.
Showing my unfamiliarity with discworld physics here. I assumed that the sun around turtle+elephants+disc is one year, while one turn of the disc is one day.
On a related topic I recently rented a movie of The Color of Magic. The elephants were shown standing motionless on the turtle with their heads pointing out and their tails pointing in. I had always assumed that the elephants were lined up around the turtle head to tail so to speak so that they could rotate the disk while the turtle kept pointing the same way.
This is about the motion of our star relative to the disk. Because our orbital inclination around the galactic core is different from other stars in the galaxy we tend to drift above the disc, then we get pulled back by gravity and pop out the bottom of the disc. When we pass through the disc we encounter more objects such as stars and gas clouds.
I read about it in books which must have been published 30 years ago, though I think the theory than was than the gravitational field of passing stars was changing the orbit of comets in the Oort cloud and causing comet impacts.
I know this is slightly offtopic, but who else noticed that it reads "WIndows 7" instead of "Windows 7" in the headline? (At the time I am writing this)
I want to know this because I suspect I might have a superpower.
You do. Its just not a very useful superpower... I see a good future for you proofreading ephemeral online news.
Show me a keyboard that even HAD the Delete or Escape keys, idiot. Hell, when I learned to type, you had to use a lowercase L for the digit 1, and a capital O for the digit zero. Exclamation point was "apostrophe, backspace, period."
You had backspace? I had to disconnect the carriage and slide it to the left.
This may be a dumb question, but would it at all be technically feasible for flight data recorders to uplink, say, an encrypted data-stream to some available satellite whenever things start to go pear-shaped?
Yes. Commercial aircraft communicate via satellite with a network called ACARS. They can use this network to send GPS position information to ATC, to communicate with air traffic controllers and to send engineering data. In the four minutes before the crash 24 engineering messages were sent by the aircraft to systems operated by the airline. There has been some talk about making more use of ACARS in the future by transmitting more of the data which goes into the recorders. The problem is that satellite communication is expensive and airlines operate on low margins.
Plenty of articles about that crash have noted that the emergency brake button was pressed and the track showed signs of emergency braking for 400 metres before the crash. Additionally A system which should have detected the stopped train failed to work in a test after the crash. This looks like a sensor problem, not a control system problem. The crash would have happened under full manual control as well.
One problem I see with the philosophy of software is the way it is tested. You create a nice, coherent application. Then testers raise 1000 bugs on it. Each of these bugs goes to a developer who changes something to fix the bug. Now you have a complete mess. Much less maintainable than the original one and quite likely with more bugs than you started out with.
So the trains in DC collided because even while the human operator tried applying the breaks the computer overrode the engineer and kept the train moving at a good speed.
Actually the brakes were on for 400 metres before the crash.
A GPS recorded speed of 100mph, into a 50mph headwind = 150 mph airspeed.
Have you thought this out? Why would flying into a headwind speed up the plane?
Just sayin'...
Lets say the pilot wants to fly at 500 knots AIS (Indicated Air Speed). They set ground speed to 500 knots with GPS but the air is going the other way to 100 knots. Airspeed is now 600 knots.
Constructive suggestions would be helpful. For the record I am sure you are right about that but I couldn't say for sure where the users expect to see improvements.
Some kangaroos get really big, like three meters tall and as strong as a lion. I have been close to animals like that in the bush and it is safe as long as you leave them alone. But I wouldn't like to find out too late that the animal was high.
He's calculated the trajactories for docking two incredibly fast moving bits of metal orbiting the moon on a slide rule! If he hadn't got that perfectly right he wouldn't be here today.
The way I read it you could do it without the slide rule. He had a simple method based on keeping the other vehicle static relative to background stars.
Definitely the right person to send to the surface with Armstrong.
Slashdot Mirror
Yesterday my wife found out that her father may have cancer. She organised for a specialist to see him tomorrow. When she got home she asked me to find the location of his office. I found a pointer to a medical directory site with his details, okay. Then she asked me how to find that address so I went separately into google maps and searched for the address. Google gave me a nice sidebar with a list of businesses in the general area I was searching for including the doctor I had been previously googling.
Now I am sure that my father in law's illness is worth at least a couple of grand to that doctor. Anything which tells google what is on my mind (say I searched youtube for CT scans of lymph nodes, a particular interest to me at the moment) helps them shake down that doctor for advertising money.
Wouldn't work that way in Australia. The Government can confiscate funds which are the proceeds of crime. For example if you commit a crime and make a fortune writing a book about it you won't be allowed to keep the money.
Showing my unfamiliarity with discworld physics here. I assumed that the sun around turtle+elephants+disc is one year, while one turn of the disc is one day.
The Galactic disk.
On a related topic I recently rented a movie of The Color of Magic. The elephants were shown standing motionless on the turtle with their heads pointing out and their tails pointing in. I had always assumed that the elephants were lined up around the turtle head to tail so to speak so that they could rotate the disk while the turtle kept pointing the same way.
This is about the motion of our star relative to the disk. Because our orbital inclination around the galactic core is different from other stars in the galaxy we tend to drift above the disc, then we get pulled back by gravity and pop out the bottom of the disc. When we pass through the disc we encounter more objects such as stars and gas clouds.
I read about it in books which must have been published 30 years ago, though I think the theory than was than the gravitational field of passing stars was changing the orbit of comets in the Oort cloud and causing comet impacts.
I wonder how you would go downloading Firefox without using Internet Explorer...
I know this is slightly offtopic, but who else noticed that it reads "WIndows 7" instead of "Windows 7" in the headline? (At the time I am writing this)
I want to know this because I suspect I might have a superpower.
You do. Its just not a very useful superpower... I see a good future for you proofreading ephemeral online news.
Yeah I wondered if I had my left and right confused there.
Show me a keyboard that even HAD the Delete or Escape keys, idiot. Hell, when I learned to type, you had to use a lowercase L for the digit 1, and a capital O for the digit zero. Exclamation point was "apostrophe, backspace, period."
You had backspace? I had to disconnect the carriage and slide it to the left.
This may be a dumb question, but would it at all be technically feasible for flight data recorders to uplink, say, an encrypted data-stream to some available satellite whenever things start to go pear-shaped?
Yes. Commercial aircraft communicate via satellite with a network called ACARS. They can use this network to send GPS position information to ATC, to communicate with air traffic controllers and to send engineering data. In the four minutes before the crash 24 engineering messages were sent by the aircraft to systems operated by the airline. There has been some talk about making more use of ACARS in the future by transmitting more of the data which goes into the recorders. The problem is that satellite communication is expensive and airlines operate on low margins.
Plenty of articles about that crash have noted that the emergency brake button was pressed and the track showed signs of emergency braking for 400 metres before the crash. Additionally A system which should have detected the stopped train failed to work in a test after the crash. This looks like a sensor problem, not a control system problem. The crash would have happened under full manual control as well.
One problem I see with the philosophy of software is the way it is tested. You create a nice, coherent application. Then testers raise 1000 bugs on it. Each of these bugs goes to a developer who changes something to fix the bug. Now you have a complete mess. Much less maintainable than the original one and quite likely with more bugs than you started out with.
So the trains in DC collided because even while the human operator tried applying the breaks the computer overrode the engineer and kept the train moving at a good speed.
Actually the brakes were on for 400 metres before the crash.
A GPS recorded speed of 100mph, into a 50mph headwind = 150 mph airspeed.
Have you thought this out? Why would flying into a headwind speed up the plane? Just sayin'...
Lets say the pilot wants to fly at 500 knots AIS (Indicated Air Speed). They set ground speed to 500 knots with GPS but the air is going the other way to 100 knots. Airspeed is now 600 knots.
I think that much was already evident from GPP. What I don't understand is why the wheel group is relevant to this.
Its an example of something trivial which RMS got pissed off about once, but which is now part of GNU for that reason only.
Constructive suggestions would be helpful. For the record I am sure you are right about that but I couldn't say for sure where the users expect to see improvements.
Everywhere else the Government either owns you, or wants to own you. The UK is actually pretty free by world standards.
But not that one. That was used 30 seconds ago.
Some kangaroos get really big, like three meters tall and as strong as a lion. I have been close to animals like that in the bush and it is safe as long as you leave them alone. But I wouldn't like to find out too late that the animal was high.
When I was fifteen I found my younger brother in the back yard with a friend smoking grass. Not marijuana, actual grass from the yard.
They thought they were getting high, but I don't think so.
Its 2009-06-26 19:49 here.
They should go to Titan. Its about as hard now as flying to the moon was in 1960.
He's calculated the trajactories for docking two incredibly fast moving bits of metal orbiting the moon on a slide rule! If he hadn't got that perfectly right he wouldn't be here today.
The way I read it you could do it without the slide rule. He had a simple method based on keeping the other vehicle static relative to background stars.
Definitely the right person to send to the surface with Armstrong.
Less Bucks. More Buck Rogers.