Ozone is a very good thing in the upper atmosphere, but it is a very bad thing in the lower atmosphere. From what I've read, I believe it is extremely chemically reactive (O2 is stable, O3 is unstable), which makes it toxic down here. But in the upper atmosphere, there's not much for it to react with, so it just floats around blocking UV rays.
The craft is saucer-shaped, but it accelerates straight upward while it's still low in the atmosphere. From TFA:
"That seems wrong but for another trick. The microwaves are reflected forward to create a superhot bubble of air above the craft and form an air spike that acts as the nose cone as the Lightcraft accelerates to 25 times the speed of sound. This cleans up the aerodynamics of a vehicle that does not look like it should fly in that direction. Even better, when the load is properly balanced the craft sails through the air without leaving a shock wave and virtually no supersonic wake."
It's essentially creating a near-vacuum above the craft, which pulls it upward with an incredible amount of force (while moving air out of the way to eliminate the incredible amount of drag you would expect in that situation). While it is true that the force will weaken as the craft ascends, by then it will already moving fast enough to break away from the Earth's gravity well. TFA mentions getting to the moon in 5.5 hours without needing any fuel on-board (just energy beamed to the craft from space), which is no small feat. The G-forces involved might kill any passengers, but it would still be great to be able to put heavy equipment in space (or on the moon) quickly and cheaply. If you want something like a moon base, this is critical.
According to the article, it sounds like it would depend on whether they're facing east or west at the time.;-)
Although this bugs me: "The volunteers were presented a series of coloured discs, and told they could tell the truth or lie about the objects' colours while half were being stimulated on the left and half on the right. Results showed that the eight volunteers who had their left DPC stimulated lied more often, while the ones with the right DPC stimulated were more likely to tell the truth, researchers said."
"More often" is nowhere close to "impossible". They don't say how much more, and it could be a very small percentage. If the percentage was large, I imagine the reporter would've put it in the article to make it sound more impressive and news-worthy (and the research team would've touted it loudly to get more interest and thus more funding). Also, there are no emotions or incentive involved in this case to lie or tell the truth and the subject knows it is a test, so it is more of a game than actually lying. Who knows what made the subjects change how they play the game? Maybe right-handed people get more annoyed by having magnets stuck to the left side of their head than the right side for some reason (right-handed people being the majority), and maybe the more annoyed the test subject is, the more likely they are to play the game negatively.
Sounds like Windows 3.x. You booted into DOS and Windows installed and ran as an application on top of it. Of course, at the time my favorite DOS command was deltree, and my favorite folder to use it on was the root Windows 3.x folder.
I went to Georgia Tech in the early 90's. There, the physics professors told all the students up front on day 1 that they were only there for the research grants, they only taught classes because it was required for them to get the grant money, they didn't care about the students, and not to bother them during their posted office hours because they weren't going to help us. During lectures, they would copy the sample problems from the book onto the board (the solutions were already explained in the book, so this taught us absolutely nothing). The TA's, on their way to becoming physics professors themselves (where else would they get research money?), had already picked up that attitude. I also assume that both the profs and the TA's wanted to strongly discourage competition for the grant money.
I suppose they get points for being honest and up front about it.;-)
Another point to that is that you're not allowed anonymity when you vote, and the SC hasn't axed that. The ballot you cast is kept secret, but they practically run a background check before letting you vote.
If everyone agreed with me, life would be a lot simpler. Hell, I'd be happy with just my wife agreeing with me more often.;-)
However, your last point is invalid because I was arguing about how I think it should be, not about what is currently legal or constitutional. The SC justices might all agree with me personally, but they're not allowed to make rulings on how they think things should be. Even if they were, and even if they agreed with me, it wouldn't matter because the Internet doesn't belong solely to the US.
IMO that's a poor comparison because it doesn't include the possibility of theft or destruction of property. If a hacker decides to DDoS an online store or hack into it and steal money from it, he can do it safely from the other side of the world. Even if his actions are discovered and/or prevented, there is practically no risk to him. In Ben's day, someone would've had to physically appear at his store to steal from it or burn it down. The only anonymity you had then was that you could hire someone else to do it (which doesn't count because you could hire a hacker today), but that person would still have to physically show up, which not only carries the risk of discovery but of being shot by the store owner or police (or tracked down later).
It's even poor from a publishing standpoint because someone could go after the publisher for slander/libel even if they didn't know who the author was. Otherwise it would be far too easy for a publisher to destroy someone's image and claim "All these stores were mailed to us anonymously". So even if the authors weren't publicly known, the publishers were. On the Internet, every person becomes a publisher, and almost every publisher is essentially anonymous.
I disagree that complete anonymity is an essential liberty. If you physically walk into a store, no one in the store may know you from Adam, but you're still not completely anonymous. If you visit the store multiple times, people will recognize you even if they don't know your name. If you make a purchase, the person behind the register is likely to remember your face and voice. You can get arrested for something you do in the store, but even if the police can't identify your name, it is irrelevant because they still have you and can let you rot in a jail cell. You can't hide behind your anonymity. IMO the same should be true on the Internet. Web sites I visit don't need to know my name/address/phone number, but should be able to trace me as a distinct person and be able to go to the police if I attempt to steal from them.
IMO the only real problem with this argument is that there is no reliable way to identify a "person" on the Internet. Give everyone a digital signature? They will be stolen, or bot-nets will route traffic through someone else's PC. It doesn't change the points of the argument, but it makes the argument moot.
In Ben's day, anonymity like this wasn't possible. While every man had the liberty to call Ben a jackass if they wanted, Ben had the opportunity to go smack him upside the head, challenge him to a duel, etc. If you had made the argument to him that people should be allowed to completely hide both their physical person and their identity while they still have the ability to harm or steal from you in some fashion (whether it's trash-talking or hacking your online business), I'm pretty sure he would have laughed at you and told you that his faith in the good nature of all men ("all" being the key word there) didn't go anywhere near that far.
They're going to have to do something about the terrible ping times. Its orbit is about 1.5AU, so when it's close to the Earth, the round-trip ping time will be about 8 minutes. When it's on the opposite side of the sun, it'll be about 40 minutes.
Good point, but I don't think "write your own well-programmed game that millions of people want to play" takes it far enough. I have a lot more respect for Notch than I do for the "Angry Birds" programmers. From a programming perspective, a simple 2D physics game is a no-brainer. They didn't even write their own physics engine, but even if they had, basic 2D physics isn't that hard. Generating, modeling, managing, rendering, and lighting an enormous 3D virtual world is orders of magnitude harder (even if it's blocky). To make one that can be modified is even worse because it means you can't just re-generate the data needed from a random seed when you need it. You have to play around with various file+directory structures to find the optimal way to store and index the modifications. We're talking about the potential of gigabytes or even terabytes of information if you modified every single block in a Minecraft world.
Of course, I probably feel this way because I've worked on the same type of programming problem myself. But trust me when I say there's a reason a game like this hasn't been done before now. Notch probably beat everyone else to it because everyone else was going for a higher level of realism. Things like realistic clouds (volumetric and animated) and trees on a planet-wide scope are ridiculously hard to render. His "everything is made up of simple blocks" is actually a very elegant solution if you're happy with the level of realism.;-)
Speaking as a programmer who has worked on his own virtual worlds (sponeil.net), I can confidently make these two points:
1) Any virtual world of such an enormous size will end up being a resource hog no matter how good the code is, ESPECIALLY if you allow modifications to that enormous world (which must be loaded, saved, and managed in memory).
2) Didn't Notch start writing it in college, or immediately after? I don't know a single programmer that could write good code right out of college. Show me a developer that can't look at code he wrote a year ago and be ashamed of it, and I'll show you a crappy developer (because he's not continuing to learn). So cut him some slack, and don't be bitter that you didn't make millions from the crappy code that you wrote right out of college.
I'm pretty sure "current" means "currently being sold", not "hasn't died yet".
I have a 7-year old PC that Windows 7 runs great on. I had to replace the video card at some point, but it was because the video card died (not because it wouldn't run 7). I also have a 10-year old PC that Windows 7 will run on, but the machine runs XP so slowly that I wouldn't want to try it. As a side note, I tried Ubuntu on it, and it ran more slowly than XP, so you may want to stick with XP.
I agree that trespassing is no good. I'm referring to private property owned by both spouses. After all, it doesn't make any sense to get proof the husband is dating someone else AFTER they have separated and moved into separate residences.
I worded that last sentence poorly. When I said "anyone", I meant anyone who wasn't a partial owner of the car. Basically, if one of the owners is present and either making the modification or supervising it, then it should be legal IMO. Otherwise, it should not.
I don't care as much about the location, but the city I live in has laws against making modifications to cars anywhere but a licensed auto shop. You can't even change your oil in your own private driveway, and definitely not on a public street. Those laws are probably unconstitutional, but the US Constitution has never stopped city hall from harassing people they want harassed.
So a guy isn't allowed to start dating after he's already completely separated and moved out? That makes even less sense. Proof of adultery should be required BEFORE the separation.
This ruling is very backwards IMO. This is the part that bothers me the most: "many of whom hire private investigators" AND "investigators make sure GPS devices are installed in cars on public streets and not private areas"
I don't have a problem with a wife installing one on her husband's car while it's on their private property. I don't even have a problem with an investigator installing it there as long as the wife is present at the time. If you're married, the car is partially hers anyway. If you can't stand the thought of something like that happening, don't get married (or live together), and your stuff will never be partially hers.
However, I have a big problem with anyone messing with someone else's car while the car is on public streets. Does anyone else think this is completely backwards?
Just turn it into a script kiddie competition. Put them in a classroom with old XP (or maybe even Windows 95) machines hooked together on a private network, show them how to get started writing email trojan scripts for Outlook Express, and let them fight it out. That's more likely to get kids interested faster (because good games take longer to write).
While I dislike the GPL, you're wrong. The problem is not that the private key used to build the OS was publicly available, but that any app using that key was trusted implicitly. Fix that (which is what they just did), and the problem goes away. From what I've read, it sounds like Windows 7 has the same problem. I believe UAC is disabled for apps signed with Microsoft's private key. If anyone ever got their hands on that key (I wouldn't be surprised if the US and/or Chinese governments already had it), they could do a lot with it.
Maybe. I try to keep an open mind about things, but she never seems to. When I trade horror stories with married co-workers (men and women), most of them seem to think I'm worse off than most. When I trade them with unmarried co-workers, some of them joke about getting a vasectomy and swearing off marriage. We've got 2 kids though, so I'll tough it out. I still say if I was independently wealthy, it would be worth it to use a significant portion of it to try to ensure that I could live my life in peace.;-)
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Ozone is a very good thing in the upper atmosphere, but it is a very bad thing in the lower atmosphere. From what I've read, I believe it is extremely chemically reactive (O2 is stable, O3 is unstable), which makes it toxic down here. But in the upper atmosphere, there's not much for it to react with, so it just floats around blocking UV rays.
They've had a proof-of-concept of sorts for this for a long time. Here's a Science@NASA article from 1999 explaining it:
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/1999/prop16apr99_1/
The craft is saucer-shaped, but it accelerates straight upward while it's still low in the atmosphere. From TFA:
"That seems wrong but for another trick. The microwaves are reflected forward to create a superhot bubble of air above the craft and form an air spike that acts as the nose cone as the Lightcraft accelerates to 25 times the speed of sound. This cleans up the aerodynamics of a vehicle that does not look like it should fly in that direction. Even better, when the load is properly balanced the craft sails through the air without leaving a shock wave and virtually no supersonic wake."
It's essentially creating a near-vacuum above the craft, which pulls it upward with an incredible amount of force (while moving air out of the way to eliminate the incredible amount of drag you would expect in that situation). While it is true that the force will weaken as the craft ascends, by then it will already moving fast enough to break away from the Earth's gravity well. TFA mentions getting to the moon in 5.5 hours without needing any fuel on-board (just energy beamed to the craft from space), which is no small feat. The G-forces involved might kill any passengers, but it would still be great to be able to put heavy equipment in space (or on the moon) quickly and cheaply. If you want something like a moon base, this is critical.
Actually:
"Inga Karton and Talis Bachmann worked with 16 volunteers..."
You're right, though. I had skimmed over that part, but that makes the claims even more ridiculous and laughable.
According to the article, it sounds like it would depend on whether they're facing east or west at the time. ;-)
Although this bugs me:
"The volunteers were presented a series of coloured discs, and told they could tell the truth or lie about the objects' colours while half were being stimulated on the left and half on the right. Results showed that the eight volunteers who had their left DPC stimulated lied more often, while the ones with the right DPC stimulated were more likely to tell the truth, researchers said."
"More often" is nowhere close to "impossible". They don't say how much more, and it could be a very small percentage. If the percentage was large, I imagine the reporter would've put it in the article to make it sound more impressive and news-worthy (and the research team would've touted it loudly to get more interest and thus more funding). Also, there are no emotions or incentive involved in this case to lie or tell the truth and the subject knows it is a test, so it is more of a game than actually lying. Who knows what made the subjects change how they play the game? Maybe right-handed people get more annoyed by having magnets stuck to the left side of their head than the right side for some reason (right-handed people being the majority), and maybe the more annoyed the test subject is, the more likely they are to play the game negatively.
Maybe it will look like a cow with a lot of extremely hot flatulence.
Sounds like Windows 3.x. You booted into DOS and Windows installed and ran as an application on top of it. Of course, at the time my favorite DOS command was deltree, and my favorite folder to use it on was the root Windows 3.x folder.
I went to Georgia Tech in the early 90's. There, the physics professors told all the students up front on day 1 that they were only there for the research grants, they only taught classes because it was required for them to get the grant money, they didn't care about the students, and not to bother them during their posted office hours because they weren't going to help us. During lectures, they would copy the sample problems from the book onto the board (the solutions were already explained in the book, so this taught us absolutely nothing). The TA's, on their way to becoming physics professors themselves (where else would they get research money?), had already picked up that attitude. I also assume that both the profs and the TA's wanted to strongly discourage competition for the grant money.
I suppose they get points for being honest and up front about it. ;-)
Another point to that is that you're not allowed anonymity when you vote, and the SC hasn't axed that. The ballot you cast is kept secret, but they practically run a background check before letting you vote.
If everyone agreed with me, life would be a lot simpler. Hell, I'd be happy with just my wife agreeing with me more often. ;-)
However, your last point is invalid because I was arguing about how I think it should be, not about what is currently legal or constitutional. The SC justices might all agree with me personally, but they're not allowed to make rulings on how they think things should be. Even if they were, and even if they agreed with me, it wouldn't matter because the Internet doesn't belong solely to the US.
IMO that's a poor comparison because it doesn't include the possibility of theft or destruction of property. If a hacker decides to DDoS an online store or hack into it and steal money from it, he can do it safely from the other side of the world. Even if his actions are discovered and/or prevented, there is practically no risk to him. In Ben's day, someone would've had to physically appear at his store to steal from it or burn it down. The only anonymity you had then was that you could hire someone else to do it (which doesn't count because you could hire a hacker today), but that person would still have to physically show up, which not only carries the risk of discovery but of being shot by the store owner or police (or tracked down later).
It's even poor from a publishing standpoint because someone could go after the publisher for slander/libel even if they didn't know who the author was. Otherwise it would be far too easy for a publisher to destroy someone's image and claim "All these stores were mailed to us anonymously". So even if the authors weren't publicly known, the publishers were. On the Internet, every person becomes a publisher, and almost every publisher is essentially anonymous.
I disagree that complete anonymity is an essential liberty. If you physically walk into a store, no one in the store may know you from Adam, but you're still not completely anonymous. If you visit the store multiple times, people will recognize you even if they don't know your name. If you make a purchase, the person behind the register is likely to remember your face and voice. You can get arrested for something you do in the store, but even if the police can't identify your name, it is irrelevant because they still have you and can let you rot in a jail cell. You can't hide behind your anonymity. IMO the same should be true on the Internet. Web sites I visit don't need to know my name/address/phone number, but should be able to trace me as a distinct person and be able to go to the police if I attempt to steal from them.
IMO the only real problem with this argument is that there is no reliable way to identify a "person" on the Internet. Give everyone a digital signature? They will be stolen, or bot-nets will route traffic through someone else's PC. It doesn't change the points of the argument, but it makes the argument moot.
In Ben's day, anonymity like this wasn't possible. While every man had the liberty to call Ben a jackass if they wanted, Ben had the opportunity to go smack him upside the head, challenge him to a duel, etc. If you had made the argument to him that people should be allowed to completely hide both their physical person and their identity while they still have the ability to harm or steal from you in some fashion (whether it's trash-talking or hacking your online business), I'm pretty sure he would have laughed at you and told you that his faith in the good nature of all men ("all" being the key word there) didn't go anywhere near that far.
I rooted my Cliq XT and loaded CM7 onto it, and it didn't take 30 minutes. It was surprisingly quick and easy.
They're going to have to do something about the terrible ping times. Its orbit is about 1.5AU, so when it's close to the Earth, the round-trip ping time will be about 8 minutes. When it's on the opposite side of the sun, it'll be about 40 minutes.
Good point, but I don't think "write your own well-programmed game that millions of people want to play" takes it far enough. I have a lot more respect for Notch than I do for the "Angry Birds" programmers. From a programming perspective, a simple 2D physics game is a no-brainer. They didn't even write their own physics engine, but even if they had, basic 2D physics isn't that hard. Generating, modeling, managing, rendering, and lighting an enormous 3D virtual world is orders of magnitude harder (even if it's blocky). To make one that can be modified is even worse because it means you can't just re-generate the data needed from a random seed when you need it. You have to play around with various file+directory structures to find the optimal way to store and index the modifications. We're talking about the potential of gigabytes or even terabytes of information if you modified every single block in a Minecraft world.
Of course, I probably feel this way because I've worked on the same type of programming problem myself. But trust me when I say there's a reason a game like this hasn't been done before now. Notch probably beat everyone else to it because everyone else was going for a higher level of realism. Things like realistic clouds (volumetric and animated) and trees on a planet-wide scope are ridiculously hard to render. His "everything is made up of simple blocks" is actually a very elegant solution if you're happy with the level of realism. ;-)
Speaking as a programmer who has worked on his own virtual worlds (sponeil.net), I can confidently make these two points:
1) Any virtual world of such an enormous size will end up being a resource hog no matter how good the code is, ESPECIALLY if you allow modifications to that enormous world (which must be loaded, saved, and managed in memory).
2) Didn't Notch start writing it in college, or immediately after? I don't know a single programmer that could write good code right out of college. Show me a developer that can't look at code he wrote a year ago and be ashamed of it, and I'll show you a crappy developer (because he's not continuing to learn). So cut him some slack, and don't be bitter that you didn't make millions from the crappy code that you wrote right out of college.
I'm pretty sure "current" means "currently being sold", not "hasn't died yet".
I have a 7-year old PC that Windows 7 runs great on. I had to replace the video card at some point, but it was because the video card died (not because it wouldn't run 7). I also have a 10-year old PC that Windows 7 will run on, but the machine runs XP so slowly that I wouldn't want to try it. As a side note, I tried Ubuntu on it, and it ran more slowly than XP, so you may want to stick with XP.
When the spheres aren't busy, the crew can pull the phones out to play Angry Birds.
I agree that trespassing is no good. I'm referring to private property owned by both spouses. After all, it doesn't make any sense to get proof the husband is dating someone else AFTER they have separated and moved into separate residences.
I worded that last sentence poorly. When I said "anyone", I meant anyone who wasn't a partial owner of the car. Basically, if one of the owners is present and either making the modification or supervising it, then it should be legal IMO. Otherwise, it should not.
I don't care as much about the location, but the city I live in has laws against making modifications to cars anywhere but a licensed auto shop. You can't even change your oil in your own private driveway, and definitely not on a public street. Those laws are probably unconstitutional, but the US Constitution has never stopped city hall from harassing people they want harassed.
So a guy isn't allowed to start dating after he's already completely separated and moved out? That makes even less sense. Proof of adultery should be required BEFORE the separation.
Only if you partially own his car.
This ruling is very backwards IMO. This is the part that bothers me the most:
"many of whom hire private investigators" AND "investigators make sure GPS devices are installed in cars on public streets and not private areas"
I don't have a problem with a wife installing one on her husband's car while it's on their private property. I don't even have a problem with an investigator installing it there as long as the wife is present at the time. If you're married, the car is partially hers anyway. If you can't stand the thought of something like that happening, don't get married (or live together), and your stuff will never be partially hers.
However, I have a big problem with anyone messing with someone else's car while the car is on public streets. Does anyone else think this is completely backwards?
Just turn it into a script kiddie competition. Put them in a classroom with old XP (or maybe even Windows 95) machines hooked together on a private network, show them how to get started writing email trojan scripts for Outlook Express, and let them fight it out. That's more likely to get kids interested faster (because good games take longer to write).
While I dislike the GPL, you're wrong. The problem is not that the private key used to build the OS was publicly available, but that any app using that key was trusted implicitly. Fix that (which is what they just did), and the problem goes away. From what I've read, it sounds like Windows 7 has the same problem. I believe UAC is disabled for apps signed with Microsoft's private key. If anyone ever got their hands on that key (I wouldn't be surprised if the US and/or Chinese governments already had it), they could do a lot with it.
Maybe. I try to keep an open mind about things, but she never seems to. When I trade horror stories with married co-workers (men and women), most of them seem to think I'm worse off than most. When I trade them with unmarried co-workers, some of them joke about getting a vasectomy and swearing off marriage. We've got 2 kids though, so I'll tough it out. I still say if I was independently wealthy, it would be worth it to use a significant portion of it to try to ensure that I could live my life in peace. ;-)