What about C-3PO? He'd fit right in with the Queer Eye crew. Though who'd want to have to put up with his companion R2D2? (I'm hardly the first to point out that they bicker like only a married couple could, and as the linked article suggests R2 is definitely male.)
but the well-known Id Software programmer John Carmack has posted on/. from time to time about his X Prize team, Armadillo Aerospace.
As far as the organisers are concerned, I can't recall them ever posting here, but the plan after the X Prize is won by somebody (probably Rutan, at this stage) is the X Prize Cup, an annual festival/competition where teams will compete to launch their craft as high and as fast as they can.
If they are successful with that competition, I imagine that sooner or later they will propose a private orbital shot.
I don't care how loud your sportsbike is, it can't be as annoying as a two-stroke racing engine. Unless the sportsbike you're talking about is a Aprilia RS250, that is...
None. Just a few science outposts. Why? There's nothing there but cold and snow.
The real reason why there's not people there is because of all the conflicting territorial claims making the easiest thing to do to declare it nobody's. If somebody clearly owned it, they'd be exploring for oil so quickly your head would spin. Mars is the same. If there's money to be made there, colonisation will happen. From what I've seen, there's a very good chance that there will, eventually, be money to be made there as a supply base for asteroid mining. Maybe not in my lifetime, but eventually. There's got to be something useful we could do with million-ton chunks of stainless steel, which is what some of the asteroids essentially are.
From the time I spent playing with genetic algorithms, the key thing you need is to be able to compare two solutions and say which is better unambigiously, in an automated fashion (you've got to be able to write a computer program to do it), and in an efficient manner.
In general, seeing comparing the performance of two video codecs involves encoding a video sample with both and examining the results, so I doubt you could ever evolve a video codec in its entirety. There might be component parts of the codec you could do this for, though. I don't know enough about video codecs to be able to comment definitively, though nothing comes to mind from what I've read about them.
I would argue that game plots are firmly in the tradition of anti-authoritarian science fiction, from some of the great works of the 1950s, through cyberpunk and the contemporary stuff. This strain of political thought is particularly strong in teen-oriented sci-fi, to take examples I remember from my own youth John Christopher and Nicholas Fisk .
There are of course very few game plots that approach the beauty of a well-written novel, or even a mediocre one.
Firstly, if we have built robots that can do anything in space that humans can, what is the point of ISS? Why have a human who requires air, food, sleep, sanitary facilties if Robonaut can do the same thing.
There is very little point to ISS. It's a make-work project for NASA and the Russian space program. About the only thing we have learned from the ISS is that putting humans in LEO for extended periods is a waste of money at present launch costs.
He hasn't made many good decisions, but ending the US commitment to the ISS in 2010 beyond "core complete" is one of Shrub's correct ones. The money could be better spent going to Mars, on unmanned planetary probes, on untold research projects (fusion, a big atom smasher, nanotube research...). Heck, deficit reduction would probably be a more useful thing to do with the money, cause, boy, you guys need it.
If I recall correctly, Japan is infamous for its illegal street racing. The tuning gear for their sports cars now imported to the US comes, to some extent, from that scene.
There's a big difference between being in public and having everything you do systematically logged by the government. The potential for abuse of such a system is very high. To consider one scenario, say your spouse hires a sleazy private detective to check up on you, who has a contact in the Ministry of Privacy (obOrwell), who finds out that you drove your car to Ogdenville about six months ago while you were supposed to be at a conference in Capital City.
Your argument rests on the false assumption that Windows and Mac provide a safe environment for DRM systems. The only difference between DRM for Linux and DRM for closed-source platforms is that there is at least an illusion for closed source platforms that DRM will work.
In practice, this is complete BS. Aside from Playfair, there are innumerable programs out there that provide "virtual sound cards", so you can rip the output of any sound player straight to your hard drive.
But software which OpenBSD uses and redistributes must be free to all (be they people or companies), for any purpose they wish to use it, including modification, use, peeing on, or even integration into baby mulching machines or atomic bombs to be dropped on Australia.
Other pertinent, although slightly dryer points on the topic:
Debian Free Software Guidelines, section 6: The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.
From What is Free Software - Free Software Foundation...The freedom to use a program means the freedom for any kind of person or organization to use it on any kind of computer system, for any kind of overall job, and without being required to communicate subsequently with the developer or any other specific entity...
From the GNU GPL: Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not covered by this License; they are outside its scope.
It's hard to see how the point could have been made by the people at the very foundation of free/open source software.
However, I'm sure the president of the LUG understands all that, and was just conducting a publicity stunt for his cause. I think it was unwise, because it'll do bugger-all for the antiwar cause (a cause which I support - that 200-odd billion dollars could have made the world a lot safer spent in a myriad other ways) and it reinforces the image of Linux enthusiasts as long-haired hippies, which still remains an impediment to wider adoption sometimes.
Using photovoltaics to generate electricity, then generate hydrogen, and burn the hydrogen to heat water sounds like a lot of inefficiency when you could use something like this.
Real sites help complete the parody...
on
SimChurch
·
· Score: 1
The point of linking to real stuff is to make the point that while Landover Baptist might be a satire, there are real people out there whose beliefs really are that crazy (at least from the perspective of the creators of Landover Baptist).
On another topic, I have to ask, do you really believe that the United Nations is the tool of the Antichrist?
According to the Wikipedia, plutonium emits alpha particles, which can't penetrate the skin. You have to swallow the stuff for it to kill you.
However, you wouldn't exactly want it lying around and getting thrown in landfills, either, so I can't imagine it being used in consumer products any time soon. At least Pu-238 can't be used in nuclear weapons (a big enough piece of the stuff to make a bomb out of would be too hot to be stable).
If testing fails to produce an outcome that brings a fault then there is a flaw in the testing procedure. The real world can have more connections, but I don't care, software can be 100% bug free.
The first thing they teach you in a software testing course is that testing cannot guarantee the absence of bugs. The only way you can guarantee, through testing alone, that your program is error-free is to exhaustively test every possible "input" (combination of external inputs and internal state) and check them. When was the last time you wrote a program with a finite (and tractable) input space?
If you need 100% reliable programs, you'll need to prove them correct, and that's enormously difficult to do, and doesn't help if the bug is the result of a flaw in the program's requirement specification rather than an incorrect implementation of that specification.
What testing *can* do is provide estimates of a system's reliability, and in the real world that's all you're going to get.
Readers will note that one of the purported backers is Roman Abramovich, the owner of the English Premier League team Chelsea (or Chelski as it has been dubbed).
I had to look some of this stuff up because my research relies on RNG-driven simulations, and it's basically enough to make your head spin. However, from what I was able to understand of the topic, you're quite wrong.
Linear congruential generators are known to be poor PRNGs, because of the "staying mainly in the plains" problem - essentially, if you use a sequence of numbers from a linear congruential generator to get a point in an n-dimensional space, and repeatedly do this to get a set of points, the points will all be in a surprisingly small number of hyperplanes in the space. This was pointed out back in the 1970's, IIRC, but people kept on using linear congruential generators with this problem for ages afterwards.
For the purposes of doing physics simulations, as I understand it the current state of the art is the Mersenne Twister PRNG. It is very fast, has an insanely long periodicity (2^19,537 or some equally outrageous figure), and hasn't had any holes poked in it yet to my knowledge.
However, none of this class of PRNG is any good for casinos, or for crypgraphic purposes, because as you point out you can figure out the state of the PRNG (and thus the next numbers in the sequence) from looking at a small sample of the output. There are PRNGs that are designed to be very difficult to determine the state of the RNG from looking at the numbers. These are called "cryptographically secure pseudo-random number generators", and Blum-Blum-Shub is perhaps the best known. It is like RSA in that its security is dependent on the difficulty of the factoring problem.
People from all walks of life gamble, as do people of all type abstain.
In Australia, statistics have been collected on this very point, and you're quite wrong. We have "mini-casinos" with one-armed bandits located across the country. Per-capita losses (absolute losses, not proportion of income) to the gambling dens inversely correlate with the socioeconomic status of the location. This Google search lists some papers on the topic.
Mr Weinstein may be a Nobel Prize winner in physics, but I'd venture he's not an expert in the state of the art of robotics.
The state of robotics for doing short-range geological/paleontological investigation work, as demonstrated by Spirit and Opportunity, is a heck of a long way behind what a human with a few tools would do. If a manned mission was there, the cycle of collect/analyse/design new experiment is so much faster because you've got decision-making capabilities right there rather than twenty light-minutes away. A human with a small lab could also conduct a much wider variety of investigations than a robotic mission could.
Not to mention that humans could drive across the surface of Mars far faster than autonomous vehicles can. The current rovers are quite a ways off the state of the art, certainly. However, as the latest DARPA challenge has demonstrated, the state of the art in autonomous vehicle design is not great in absolute terms - and that's on Earth under a better-known set of conditions. You might argue that instead of moving around by ground a robotic mission could be designed to move through the air, but aside from the question of how the heck you're going to power such a mission you're then left with trying to land it autonomously a large number of times on undulating, rocky terrain.
Now, the question is whether the greatly increased cost of crewed missions is worth the greatly increased science return. I would argue that one crewed mission could achieve as much as hundreds of robotic missions, on the basis of the area they could cover, and the variety and dynamic nature of the investigations they could undertake. I would fully agree with Weinstein that the Shuttle and the ISS have been a gross waste of time, and would not be sad if they were cancelled. But that doesn't mean a future crewed Mars mission will be.
It's a makeable argument that you'd get a better science return over the next couple of decades from a combination of unmanned space probes and other scientific experiments (like funding ITER, the Superconducting Supercollider, and so on), than funding a Mars mission.
However, seeing the US government is prepared to waste hundreds of billions of dollars on a missile defence that's not going to work, and is spending over 200 billion dollars to install what looks like a Shiite theocracy in Iraq, and will spend 300 billion in the next decade on propping up the otherwise unsustainable property values of America's farmers (that works out to US $20,000 annually per farm job), I would argue that 100 billion over a decade or two (see this article for a discussion of why it's not going to cost a trillion dollars) is a heck of a lot better investment.
While I have enjoyed reading about Mr. Carmack's adventures in rocketry as much as anyone, let's just note that he is still largely playing with motors in his shed. If you read his Armadillo journal it's taken him weeks and weeks to track down problems with being able to restart the motors when warm.
I would argue that he'll be a lot more qualified to make the claim that aerospace is not so hard if and when he actually launches (and recovers in one piece) his craft...
Start with Bush Sr's initial project proposal for $400 to $500 billion. Adjust for today's inflation (x1.6) = $640 to $800. Then the reporter adjusted it to $1 trillion for no reason at all. When confronted, his reponse was "Oh well". The initial project proposal was for a combined moon base + mars base project, over a life cycle of 30 years. And it was based on a different deployment method; replace the original proposal rockets with modern Delta 2s at 1/4th the cost.
At this point we should point out one of the key reasons why the mission can be done cheaper than this: you can radically reduce the amount of mass required by producing the propellant for the return trip on Mars. Instead of carting 100-odd tonnes of propellant, you cart a few tonnes of hydrogen (maybe even mine indigenous water), and a few tonnes of nuclear reactor. Voila, radical cost reduction.
While it's good that Bill is giving away a lot of money to worthy causes, the net effect to his material lifestyle of giving away 25 billion dollars (say 25% of his net worth) is essentially zero. If I gave away 25% of my net worth it would cause major changes to my lifestyle.
So your saying that, for example, Microsoft couldn't *possibly* produce one or more nukes?(Or IBM, or Shell, or Haliburton for that matter?).
Sure, they've got the resources and product development skills to do such a thing. But it's extremely unlikely that they could do so without the government knowing about it - and, a government that let a private organisation build a bomb on their soil would be just as guilty as a government that built the bomb directly.
This review criticises the installer for requiring the user to make too many decisions, and using unfamiliar terminology (what's a home directory?), in the belief that the installer is designed to make it as easy as possible for Joe User to install Debian. That belief is incorrect.
As I understand it, the new Debian installer is designed for two purposes - portability to all the architectures Debian uses, and flexibility so Debian can be installed just the way one likes it on the widest possible variety of hardware. Idiot-proofing is a lot lower priority. You may disagree with their prioritisation. I personally think that if you're not prepared to spend a few minutes reading some instructions before you install a new operating system and totally change the way your computer operates, you shouldn't be installing a new operating system anyway.
If you want an all-singing, all-dancing, drool-proof, but less flexible Debian installer just for i386, I believe Progeny has built one.
Slashdot Mirror
What about C-3PO? He'd fit right in with the Queer Eye crew. Though who'd want to have to put up with his companion R2D2? (I'm hardly the first to point out that they bicker like only a married couple could, and as the linked article suggests R2 is definitely male.)
As far as the organisers are concerned, I can't recall them ever posting here, but the plan after the X Prize is won by somebody (probably Rutan, at this stage) is the X Prize Cup, an annual festival/competition where teams will compete to launch their craft as high and as fast as they can.
If they are successful with that competition, I imagine that sooner or later they will propose a private orbital shot.
I don't care how loud your sportsbike is, it can't be as annoying as a two-stroke racing engine. Unless the sportsbike you're talking about is a Aprilia RS250, that is...
The real reason why there's not people there is because of all the conflicting territorial claims making the easiest thing to do to declare it nobody's. If somebody clearly owned it, they'd be exploring for oil so quickly your head would spin. Mars is the same. If there's money to be made there, colonisation will happen. From what I've seen, there's a very good chance that there will, eventually, be money to be made there as a supply base for asteroid mining. Maybe not in my lifetime, but eventually. There's got to be something useful we could do with million-ton chunks of stainless steel, which is what some of the asteroids essentially are.
In general, seeing comparing the performance of two video codecs involves encoding a video sample with both and examining the results, so I doubt you could ever evolve a video codec in its entirety. There might be component parts of the codec you could do this for, though. I don't know enough about video codecs to be able to comment definitively, though nothing comes to mind from what I've read about them.
There are of course very few game plots that approach the beauty of a well-written novel, or even a mediocre one.
Hell of a band and a hell of a nice guy, too.
There is very little point to ISS. It's a make-work project for NASA and the Russian space program. About the only thing we have learned from the ISS is that putting humans in LEO for extended periods is a waste of money at present launch costs.
He hasn't made many good decisions, but ending the US commitment to the ISS in 2010 beyond "core complete" is one of Shrub's correct ones. The money could be better spent going to Mars, on unmanned planetary probes, on untold research projects (fusion, a big atom smasher, nanotube research...). Heck, deficit reduction would probably be a more useful thing to do with the money, cause, boy, you guys need it.
If I recall correctly, Japan is infamous for its illegal street racing. The tuning gear for their sports cars now imported to the US comes, to some extent, from that scene.
There's a big difference between being in public and having everything you do systematically logged by the government. The potential for abuse of such a system is very high. To consider one scenario, say your spouse hires a sleazy private detective to check up on you, who has a contact in the Ministry of Privacy (obOrwell), who finds out that you drove your car to Ogdenville about six months ago while you were supposed to be at a conference in Capital City.
In practice, this is complete BS. Aside from Playfair, there are innumerable programs out there that provide "virtual sound cards", so you can rip the output of any sound player straight to your hard drive.
Other pertinent, although slightly dryer points on the topic:
It's hard to see how the point could have been made by the people at the very foundation of free/open source software.
However, I'm sure the president of the LUG understands all that, and was just conducting a publicity stunt for his cause. I think it was unwise, because it'll do bugger-all for the antiwar cause (a cause which I support - that 200-odd billion dollars could have made the world a lot safer spent in a myriad other ways) and it reinforces the image of Linux enthusiasts as long-haired hippies, which still remains an impediment to wider adoption sometimes.
Using photovoltaics to generate electricity, then generate hydrogen, and burn the hydrogen to heat water sounds like a lot of inefficiency when you could use something like this.
On another topic, I have to ask, do you really believe that the United Nations is the tool of the Antichrist?
However, you wouldn't exactly want it lying around and getting thrown in landfills, either, so I can't imagine it being used in consumer products any time soon. At least Pu-238 can't be used in nuclear weapons (a big enough piece of the stuff to make a bomb out of would be too hot to be stable).
The first thing they teach you in a software testing course is that testing cannot guarantee the absence of bugs. The only way you can guarantee, through testing alone, that your program is error-free is to exhaustively test every possible "input" (combination of external inputs and internal state) and check them. When was the last time you wrote a program with a finite (and tractable) input space?
If you need 100% reliable programs, you'll need to prove them correct, and that's enormously difficult to do, and doesn't help if the bug is the result of a flaw in the program's requirement specification rather than an incorrect implementation of that specification.
What testing *can* do is provide estimates of a system's reliability, and in the real world that's all you're going to get.
Readers will note that one of the purported backers is Roman Abramovich, the owner of the English Premier League team Chelsea (or Chelski as it has been dubbed).
Linear congruential generators are known to be poor PRNGs, because of the "staying mainly in the plains" problem - essentially, if you use a sequence of numbers from a linear congruential generator to get a point in an n-dimensional space, and repeatedly do this to get a set of points, the points will all be in a surprisingly small number of hyperplanes in the space. This was pointed out back in the 1970's, IIRC, but people kept on using linear congruential generators with this problem for ages afterwards. For the purposes of doing physics simulations, as I understand it the current state of the art is the Mersenne Twister PRNG. It is very fast, has an insanely long periodicity (2^19,537 or some equally outrageous figure), and hasn't had any holes poked in it yet to my knowledge.
However, none of this class of PRNG is any good for casinos, or for crypgraphic purposes, because as you point out you can figure out the state of the PRNG (and thus the next numbers in the sequence) from looking at a small sample of the output. There are PRNGs that are designed to be very difficult to determine the state of the RNG from looking at the numbers. These are called "cryptographically secure pseudo-random number generators", and Blum-Blum-Shub is perhaps the best known. It is like RSA in that its security is dependent on the difficulty of the factoring problem.
The state of robotics for doing short-range geological/paleontological investigation work, as demonstrated by Spirit and Opportunity, is a heck of a long way behind what a human with a few tools would do. If a manned mission was there, the cycle of collect/analyse/design new experiment is so much faster because you've got decision-making capabilities right there rather than twenty light-minutes away. A human with a small lab could also conduct a much wider variety of investigations than a robotic mission could.
Not to mention that humans could drive across the surface of Mars far faster than autonomous vehicles can. The current rovers are quite a ways off the state of the art, certainly. However, as the latest DARPA challenge has demonstrated, the state of the art in autonomous vehicle design is not great in absolute terms - and that's on Earth under a better-known set of conditions. You might argue that instead of moving around by ground a robotic mission could be designed to move through the air, but aside from the question of how the heck you're going to power such a mission you're then left with trying to land it autonomously a large number of times on undulating, rocky terrain.
Now, the question is whether the greatly increased cost of crewed missions is worth the greatly increased science return. I would argue that one crewed mission could achieve as much as hundreds of robotic missions, on the basis of the area they could cover, and the variety and dynamic nature of the investigations they could undertake. I would fully agree with Weinstein that the Shuttle and the ISS have been a gross waste of time, and would not be sad if they were cancelled. But that doesn't mean a future crewed Mars mission will be.
It's a makeable argument that you'd get a better science return over the next couple of decades from a combination of unmanned space probes and other scientific experiments (like funding ITER, the Superconducting Supercollider, and so on), than funding a Mars mission.
However, seeing the US government is prepared to waste hundreds of billions of dollars on a missile defence that's not going to work, and is spending over 200 billion dollars to install what looks like a Shiite theocracy in Iraq, and will spend 300 billion in the next decade on propping up the otherwise unsustainable property values of America's farmers (that works out to US $20,000 annually per farm job), I would argue that 100 billion over a decade or two (see this article for a discussion of why it's not going to cost a trillion dollars) is a heck of a lot better investment.
I would argue that he'll be a lot more qualified to make the claim that aerospace is not so hard if and when he actually launches (and recovers in one piece) his craft...
At this point we should point out one of the key reasons why the mission can be done cheaper than this: you can radically reduce the amount of mass required by producing the propellant for the return trip on Mars. Instead of carting 100-odd tonnes of propellant, you cart a few tonnes of hydrogen (maybe even mine indigenous water), and a few tonnes of nuclear reactor. Voila, radical cost reduction.
While it's good that Bill is giving away a lot of money to worthy causes, the net effect to his material lifestyle of giving away 25 billion dollars (say 25% of his net worth) is essentially zero. If I gave away 25% of my net worth it would cause major changes to my lifestyle.
Sure, they've got the resources and product development skills to do such a thing. But it's extremely unlikely that they could do so without the government knowing about it - and, a government that let a private organisation build a bomb on their soil would be just as guilty as a government that built the bomb directly.
As I understand it, the new Debian installer is designed for two purposes - portability to all the architectures Debian uses, and flexibility so Debian can be installed just the way one likes it on the widest possible variety of hardware. Idiot-proofing is a lot lower priority. You may disagree with their prioritisation. I personally think that if you're not prepared to spend a few minutes reading some instructions before you install a new operating system and totally change the way your computer operates, you shouldn't be installing a new operating system anyway.
If you want an all-singing, all-dancing, drool-proof, but less flexible Debian installer just for i386, I believe Progeny has built one.