Yeah, but the weird thing about the Shuttle is that later design changes increased the weight of the orbiter, so they need to go past the 100% "maximum rating" in order to take off. It just one of the many WTFs with the shuttle design.
To be fair, I don't blame NASA for the Shuttle being the way it was. They had to do the best with the funding and deadlines that Congress gave them. Trying to design a single vehicle to handle cargo and human crew while still being reusable is hard, and compromises are inevitable.
Re:I like holding the mouse over fake holding one!
on
The Mouse Vanishes
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Well, its a bit strong to say that they have no problems. Sure, they may be able to accomplish whatever task they need to using the trackpad alone, but I think most people would that they would prefer a mouse. Just because something works doesn't mean its the optimal way to do things.
The difference is that e-mail (and, to a lesser extent, instant messaging) were based around open networks, where any client that followed the necessary protocol could communicate. That's not the case with Facebook. Facebook, as a network, is totally owned by a single entity. As such, its much more restrictive about what you do with it, and what it does with your information.
I have no objection to the concept of social media. My quarrel is with the current implementations. They're all very closed and centralized. As Facebook has demonstrated repeatedly, they have no qualms about using your data in ways that you didn't intend for them to use it. That's not true with e-mail. That's not true with IM.
Windows XP 64-bit earned its bad reputation because of the lack of stable 64-bit drivers. Hardware manufacturers (correctly) assumed that very few Windows XP users would go to 64-bit, and reserved their 64-bit driver efforts for Vista and 7. As such, the 64-bit XP drivers were half-assed ports of their 32-bit cousins, and often never worked properly.
To be honest, I think the first 64-bit iteration of any OS (be it Windows, Mac, or Linux) is bound to have problems as software and hardware manufacturers make the transition.
By this person's argument, should hospitals tolerate bad doctors? I mean, both teachers and doctors have a strong impact on the people they're dealing with. They're both in positions of power over their students and patients, respectively. Most importantly, they can both cause harm when they're incompetent. I never hear about people preaching tolerance for bad doctors. So why should we tolerate bad teachers?
Well, I doubt that spectrographic analysis is too useful. Simply put, there's a lot of air over any specific point of earth. In comparison with that total volume of air, the exhaust trail of even a thousand jets is probably still beneath the threshold of detection.
I'd argue that the purpose of the hydrogen is to 1) earn subsidies from the alternative energy lobby in Congress and 2) increase the endurance of the aircraft. Given that the UAV is designed for visual and electronic intelligence gathering, loiter time is a key requirement.
Also, the big threat of nuclear weapons is speed and stealth.
UAVs have that. Sure, a MiG can shoot down a UAV with ease. However, in order to shoot down the UAV, it first has to find the UAV. Given that UAVs don't need pilots, control surfaces and intakes (the two most radar reflective portions of any aircraft) can be positioned in a way to minimize radar cross section in a way that even ultra-stealth aircraft like the B-2 cannot do. Combined with the ability of a UAV to fly a computer controlled course at very low altitude (just like cruise missiles), the ultra-low RCS means that these modern UAVs are the cruise missile equivalent of MIRVs. You can load a UAV with multiple cruise missiles and have it launch those missiles after it gets inside enemy airspace.
(and don't worry about treaties with the Russians, these qualify as airplanes, not missiles...
If I understand correctly, the arms control treaties we have apply to deployed warheads, not delivery systems. By that accounting, a warhead deployed on a UAV is the same as a warhead deployed on a missile, so I don't see how either the US or Russia could squirrel out of an arms control treaty by using UAVs rather than ICBMs.
Not necessarily. As a sibling points out, the B-2 is larger, yet manages to maintain a very small radar cross-section. Actually, being unmanned allows this aircraft to have a much smaller radar signature than a manned plane of similar size, as things like engine air intakes and control surfaces can be placed in a more optimal fashion when the front portion of the aircraft doesn't need to be reserved for the cockpit.
I wouldn't be surprised if this plane managed to pack more ordinance than a B-2, despite being of smaller size.
They didn't christen it with a homophone for tyrant, they christened it with the name of the Norse god of thunder. I guess they wanted the name to be a little more sophisticated than "Thor".
It is only with freedom and liberty does civilization thrive.
History disagrees. Every civilization, from Ancient Sumer, right up to our own had slavery at one point or another. The fact that we get by right now without slavery in the US says very little about the necessity of freedom and liberty for civilization. In fact, I'd almost argue the opposite - slavery and oppression are the two tools that allow civilizations to go from city or nation state to empire. Recall Rome. As a republic, it conquered Italy. Under an emperor, Rome was able to conquer most of Europe, North Africa and Asia Minor.
Empathy? According to prevailing beliefs (held by all but ignorant red-staters), the state of those countries is what the people of those countries want, and for Americans to feel that this is wrong is to be disrespectful of Islamic culture.
In my opinion, its a little bit more subtle than that. The wider moderate Islamic society wants peace and liberty. However, it also wants a smooth transition from the current state of affairs to the world where freedom of expression is tolerated. There's an Islamic proverb, "Better 1000 days of tyranny than 1 day of anarchy." It describes the state of affairs in Islamic culture very well. Everyone wants change, but no one is willing to risk the anarchy necessary to effect it.
Another issue in the Islamic world is the schizoid attitude towards freedom of expression. Freedom of expression is to be demanded wherever Muslims are not free to express their religion. We see this in the reaction towards French bans on headscarves and Swiss bans on minarets. On the other hand, practitioners of non-Islamic religion and culture can have their culture suppressed. I've heard otherwise moderate and sensible Muslims say, "Ah, I would love to have the free speech of the West, if only I could filter out the 'filth.'" The thing that they're missing is that you don't get the benefits of free speech by only allowing free speech in limited areas. True, a lot of religious people believe this, but the Muslim world is the last place where religion is still dominant as a political force.
Yeah, that all makes sense, but lets remember that Steven Chu has very little to do with any of the stuff that's going wrong. The DoE is essentially a laboratory, pushing research into new forms of energy generation and transport. Steven Chu knows the limits of his power and expertise and stays well away from fields where he doesn't have the necessary expertise and could do more harm than good. Heck, if more politicians followed his lead and STFU about things they know nothing about, the world would be a lot less fucked up at the moment.
This is oft repeated garbage. Worse is the saying that a theory is essentially a scientific fact. A theory is no more a hypothesis which has withstood testing.
That's true, but, frankly its a lot better than most of the "knowledge", or "common sense" out there. I'd rather base my work on a theory over common sense any day.
Acting as if theories are somehow more than the current best guess(es) of the scientific method is throwing out the skepticism that is the core of said method.
There are different levels of skepticism, you know. The type of nihilistic skepticism you're advocating is just as unproductive as the blind acceptance that religion advocates. If every scientist had to start directly from first principles, then no progress would ever be made. To paraphrase Newton, one only sees farther than others by standing on the shoulders of giants.
More generally, if we had to doubt and verify every piece of information that came before us, we would not have any time to actually use that information to construct useful artifacts.
And don't bother with "technically that's true but..." technically that's true invalidates the but you'd be tempted to tack on the end. Period.
Writing out the word, "period" invalidates any statement that occurs before it.
Sure, people can be traced if their actions are bad enough to be criminal. The problem is that there's a huge gap between "perfectly acceptable, normal etiquette" and "criminal misbehavior." In real life, deviations from normal etiquette are handled by social norms and mores. If you are a total jerk (but not to the point of being criminal) then you're ostracized. Its much more difficult to do this online, because whenever you do so, the person on the other end is free to change handles and get a "clean slate."
That said, I do think Blizzard went about this in totally the wrong way. Like the Penny Arcade guys point out, World of Warcraft is a role playing game. People are playing it specifically to get away from their real life identities. A better solution might have been to have persistent identities, but not link them in any way to the real world. One possible implementation would be to allow each World of Warcraft account to have only one or at most a few forum accounts. In order to get more forum accounts, one would have to pay extra and sign up another World of Warcraft account. That cost alone would be a significant obstacle to the trolls, and it would preserve users' privacy.
If the student wants to succeed, he or she has to teach him- or herself. To do this, the university provides a number of resources the student can use: lectures, teaching assistants, textbooks, libraries, etc.
That is the reality, but that isn't how it should be. Universities should teach. After all, if they're not teaching, then why are we paying them such enormous amounts of money in tuition? That awesome research professor the administrators hire does me no good if I can't understand his lectures.
Well, I don't know about Austin, but here in Minneapolis we have regular bus routes that stop at every corner and "limited stop" routes that are more like what you describe - stops every 5KM or so. Do they have anything like that in Austin?
The big thing that desktop and full-size laptops have that these complements do not is a full size physical keyboard. True, most people use them as glorified typewriters, but a significant number of those people also know how to touch-type. People will stick with traditional computers for document creation and processing until a touchscreen can give them the same level of haptic feedback that a physical keyboard does.
The tablet computers, smartphones and other personal electronic devices will complement the main desktop that people have, because people want a large screen for certain tasks. Not everything can be done on a 4.3" screen. However, the increasing prevalence of smartphones and other complements to the main desktop means that users will expect their applications and data to transition relatively seamlessly from one platform to another. This is where Microsoft gets into trouble. Soon users are going to demand the ability to at least view their data on a wide variety of platforms. Visual Studio and the rest of Microsoft's development tools make it very difficult to ensure that.
Publication, or the threat thereof is the only way that this problem will get addressed. According to this researcher, these exploits are being used by criminals right now. Its the ATM companies that want this covered up, so that they can present their machines as "totally secure", when in fact they're riddled with more holes than Swiss cheese.
In fact, publication would help the banks, as they would be able to test ATMs to see which ones were vulnerable. This would allow them to hold the ATM vendors accountable, rather than just having to accept a certain level of "loss" from ATMs.
The myth is that it is especially so. Most languages are crossplatform to the same degree, including C, Python, Haskell and ECMAscript.
The other languages, sure, but not C. Sure, the standard library is cross platform, but the moment you go beyond the standard C library, you're stuck with platform specific tools. With Java, you can write an application that takes draws a GUI for the user, pushes files over the network, plays sound, etc. without touching any platform specific code. You can do the same (I think) with Python and ECMAScript (with HTML5). You can't do that in a totally cross platform manner with C.
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Yeah, but the weird thing about the Shuttle is that later design changes increased the weight of the orbiter, so they need to go past the 100% "maximum rating" in order to take off. It just one of the many WTFs with the shuttle design.
To be fair, I don't blame NASA for the Shuttle being the way it was. They had to do the best with the funding and deadlines that Congress gave them. Trying to design a single vehicle to handle cargo and human crew while still being reusable is hard, and compromises are inevitable.
Well, its a bit strong to say that they have no problems. Sure, they may be able to accomplish whatever task they need to using the trackpad alone, but I think most people would that they would prefer a mouse. Just because something works doesn't mean its the optimal way to do things.
The difference is that e-mail (and, to a lesser extent, instant messaging) were based around open networks, where any client that followed the necessary protocol could communicate. That's not the case with Facebook. Facebook, as a network, is totally owned by a single entity. As such, its much more restrictive about what you do with it, and what it does with your information.
I have no objection to the concept of social media. My quarrel is with the current implementations. They're all very closed and centralized. As Facebook has demonstrated repeatedly, they have no qualms about using your data in ways that you didn't intend for them to use it. That's not true with e-mail. That's not true with IM.
True that. I just got a new desktop at work. Its got a sticker on it with the Windows 7 logo. What OS is it running? Windows XP SP 3.
Windows XP 64-bit earned its bad reputation because of the lack of stable 64-bit drivers. Hardware manufacturers (correctly) assumed that very few Windows XP users would go to 64-bit, and reserved their 64-bit driver efforts for Vista and 7. As such, the 64-bit XP drivers were half-assed ports of their 32-bit cousins, and often never worked properly.
To be honest, I think the first 64-bit iteration of any OS (be it Windows, Mac, or Linux) is bound to have problems as software and hardware manufacturers make the transition.
By this person's argument, should hospitals tolerate bad doctors? I mean, both teachers and doctors have a strong impact on the people they're dealing with. They're both in positions of power over their students and patients, respectively. Most importantly, they can both cause harm when they're incompetent. I never hear about people preaching tolerance for bad doctors. So why should we tolerate bad teachers?
Well, I doubt that spectrographic analysis is too useful. Simply put, there's a lot of air over any specific point of earth. In comparison with that total volume of air, the exhaust trail of even a thousand jets is probably still beneath the threshold of detection.
I'd argue that the purpose of the hydrogen is to 1) earn subsidies from the alternative energy lobby in Congress and 2) increase the endurance of the aircraft. Given that the UAV is designed for visual and electronic intelligence gathering, loiter time is a key requirement.
Also, the big threat of nuclear weapons is speed and stealth.
UAVs have that. Sure, a MiG can shoot down a UAV with ease. However, in order to shoot down the UAV, it first has to find the UAV. Given that UAVs don't need pilots, control surfaces and intakes (the two most radar reflective portions of any aircraft) can be positioned in a way to minimize radar cross section in a way that even ultra-stealth aircraft like the B-2 cannot do. Combined with the ability of a UAV to fly a computer controlled course at very low altitude (just like cruise missiles), the ultra-low RCS means that these modern UAVs are the cruise missile equivalent of MIRVs. You can load a UAV with multiple cruise missiles and have it launch those missiles after it gets inside enemy airspace.
(and don't worry about treaties with the Russians, these qualify as airplanes, not missiles...
If I understand correctly, the arms control treaties we have apply to deployed warheads, not delivery systems. By that accounting, a warhead deployed on a UAV is the same as a warhead deployed on a missile, so I don't see how either the US or Russia could squirrel out of an arms control treaty by using UAVs rather than ICBMs.
Not necessarily. As a sibling points out, the B-2 is larger, yet manages to maintain a very small radar cross-section. Actually, being unmanned allows this aircraft to have a much smaller radar signature than a manned plane of similar size, as things like engine air intakes and control surfaces can be placed in a more optimal fashion when the front portion of the aircraft doesn't need to be reserved for the cockpit.
I wouldn't be surprised if this plane managed to pack more ordinance than a B-2, despite being of smaller size.
They didn't christen it with a homophone for tyrant, they christened it with the name of the Norse god of thunder. I guess they wanted the name to be a little more sophisticated than "Thor".
It is only with freedom and liberty does civilization thrive.
History disagrees. Every civilization, from Ancient Sumer, right up to our own had slavery at one point or another. The fact that we get by right now without slavery in the US says very little about the necessity of freedom and liberty for civilization. In fact, I'd almost argue the opposite - slavery and oppression are the two tools that allow civilizations to go from city or nation state to empire. Recall Rome. As a republic, it conquered Italy. Under an emperor, Rome was able to conquer most of Europe, North Africa and Asia Minor.
Empathy? According to prevailing beliefs (held by all but ignorant red-staters), the state of those countries is what the people of those countries want, and for Americans to feel that this is wrong is to be disrespectful of Islamic culture.
In my opinion, its a little bit more subtle than that. The wider moderate Islamic society wants peace and liberty. However, it also wants a smooth transition from the current state of affairs to the world where freedom of expression is tolerated. There's an Islamic proverb, "Better 1000 days of tyranny than 1 day of anarchy." It describes the state of affairs in Islamic culture very well. Everyone wants change, but no one is willing to risk the anarchy necessary to effect it.
Another issue in the Islamic world is the schizoid attitude towards freedom of expression. Freedom of expression is to be demanded wherever Muslims are not free to express their religion. We see this in the reaction towards French bans on headscarves and Swiss bans on minarets. On the other hand, practitioners of non-Islamic religion and culture can have their culture suppressed. I've heard otherwise moderate and sensible Muslims say, "Ah, I would love to have the free speech of the West, if only I could filter out the 'filth.'" The thing that they're missing is that you don't get the benefits of free speech by only allowing free speech in limited areas. True, a lot of religious people believe this, but the Muslim world is the last place where religion is still dominant as a political force.
Yeah, that all makes sense, but lets remember that Steven Chu has very little to do with any of the stuff that's going wrong. The DoE is essentially a laboratory, pushing research into new forms of energy generation and transport. Steven Chu knows the limits of his power and expertise and stays well away from fields where he doesn't have the necessary expertise and could do more harm than good. Heck, if more politicians followed his lead and STFU about things they know nothing about, the world would be a lot less fucked up at the moment.
This is oft repeated garbage. Worse is the saying that a theory is essentially a scientific fact. A theory is no more a hypothesis which has withstood testing.
That's true, but, frankly its a lot better than most of the "knowledge", or "common sense" out there. I'd rather base my work on a theory over common sense any day.
Acting as if theories are somehow more than the current best guess(es) of the scientific method is throwing out the skepticism that is the core of said method.
There are different levels of skepticism, you know. The type of nihilistic skepticism you're advocating is just as unproductive as the blind acceptance that religion advocates. If every scientist had to start directly from first principles, then no progress would ever be made. To paraphrase Newton, one only sees farther than others by standing on the shoulders of giants.
More generally, if we had to doubt and verify every piece of information that came before us, we would not have any time to actually use that information to construct useful artifacts.
And don't bother with "technically that's true but..." technically that's true invalidates the but you'd be tempted to tack on the end. Period.
Writing out the word, "period" invalidates any statement that occurs before it.
Sure, people can be traced if their actions are bad enough to be criminal. The problem is that there's a huge gap between "perfectly acceptable, normal etiquette" and "criminal misbehavior." In real life, deviations from normal etiquette are handled by social norms and mores. If you are a total jerk (but not to the point of being criminal) then you're ostracized. Its much more difficult to do this online, because whenever you do so, the person on the other end is free to change handles and get a "clean slate."
That said, I do think Blizzard went about this in totally the wrong way. Like the Penny Arcade guys point out, World of Warcraft is a role playing game. People are playing it specifically to get away from their real life identities. A better solution might have been to have persistent identities, but not link them in any way to the real world. One possible implementation would be to allow each World of Warcraft account to have only one or at most a few forum accounts. In order to get more forum accounts, one would have to pay extra and sign up another World of Warcraft account. That cost alone would be a significant obstacle to the trolls, and it would preserve users' privacy.
Right, but not every government department puts that hash up on its official seal.
If the student wants to succeed, he or she has to teach him- or herself. To do this, the university provides a number of resources the student can use: lectures, teaching assistants, textbooks, libraries, etc.
That is the reality, but that isn't how it should be. Universities should teach. After all, if they're not teaching, then why are we paying them such enormous amounts of money in tuition? That awesome research professor the administrators hire does me no good if I can't understand his lectures.
Well, I don't know about Austin, but here in Minneapolis we have regular bus routes that stop at every corner and "limited stop" routes that are more like what you describe - stops every 5KM or so. Do they have anything like that in Austin?
Man, you've never been to the suburbs, have you? I mean, where I live, the nearest stop is biking/driving distance.
The big thing that desktop and full-size laptops have that these complements do not is a full size physical keyboard. True, most people use them as glorified typewriters, but a significant number of those people also know how to touch-type. People will stick with traditional computers for document creation and processing until a touchscreen can give them the same level of haptic feedback that a physical keyboard does.
The tablet computers, smartphones and other personal electronic devices will complement the main desktop that people have, because people want a large screen for certain tasks. Not everything can be done on a 4.3" screen. However, the increasing prevalence of smartphones and other complements to the main desktop means that users will expect their applications and data to transition relatively seamlessly from one platform to another. This is where Microsoft gets into trouble. Soon users are going to demand the ability to at least view their data on a wide variety of platforms. Visual Studio and the rest of Microsoft's development tools make it very difficult to ensure that.
Well, I guess he's saying that the world 10 years hence will be a lot like the world today, then.
Publication, or the threat thereof is the only way that this problem will get addressed. According to this researcher, these exploits are being used by criminals right now. Its the ATM companies that want this covered up, so that they can present their machines as "totally secure", when in fact they're riddled with more holes than Swiss cheese.
In fact, publication would help the banks, as they would be able to test ATMs to see which ones were vulnerable. This would allow them to hold the ATM vendors accountable, rather than just having to accept a certain level of "loss" from ATMs.
The myth is that it is especially so. Most languages are crossplatform to the same degree, including C, Python, Haskell and ECMAscript.
The other languages, sure, but not C. Sure, the standard library is cross platform, but the moment you go beyond the standard C library, you're stuck with platform specific tools. With Java, you can write an application that takes draws a GUI for the user, pushes files over the network, plays sound, etc. without touching any platform specific code. You can do the same (I think) with Python and ECMAScript (with HTML5). You can't do that in a totally cross platform manner with C.