Your solution doesn't work. It fails on new years eve if someone is in a different time zone or if their clock is slightly off.
You need to talk to Microsoft - they could have used someone like you when they were building their 'stampinf' tool that I can't use until 10am in the morning (11am during DST) because it stamps UTC which then confuses another tool in the build chain...
4) Code must always be 'self documenting' ('would you rather use a one-liner that requires a 3-line comment, or a 10-liner that requires no comments?').
Or to put some more straw in it "would you rather use a one-liner that requires 1 character of comments, or a 1 billion-liner that requires no comments".
If your 1 line of code is so complicated that it takes 10 lines to write it out in a way that is easily understood, then 3 lines of comments is probably not going to do it justice.
Wasn't one of the mantra's of the humorous Job Security paper that someone published a while back that you should comment only the obvious stuff, eg:
while (i epsilon(n)) {
i += (j + 47) * 55 - sqrt(r) + j * j - r * r - pom(); } i++;// increment i by 1
Myself, I comment next to nothing unless I suspect that I won't know what I was thinking if I come back to the code in 6 months. If I come back to code in 6 months and can't remember what it does or why it does it that way, I'll put comments in for next time.
Nobody ever wins the lottery anyway. I took a quick sample of the subset of the population that participated in lotteries and none of them had ever won, and by extrapolating that data I was able to prove that nobody had ever won a lottery ever.
Some other studies have been done that came to different conclusions but I believe that their data collection methodology was flawed as their results didn't agree with mine, so I think they can be safely excluded.
Because Apophis is under observation we know exactly what the risk is.
Aren't some of them a bit unpredictable due to the ejection of matter (eg steam) as they get closer to the sun? Or maybe i've been reading too much SciFi.
The real risks come from objects we are not currently observing.
That's certainly true. Wasn't there one that came pretty close recently that we only noticed as it was leaving?
I was using dialup as little as 5 years ago. I was too far from the exchange for ADSL and ISDN was too expensive. Then Telstra introduced a plan where you paid about $100/month for BRI ISDN, giving you 2 64K channels. So I could be surfing at 128K unless someone wanted to use the phone in which case it would drop back to 64K. Better than my 33K modem! I assume Telstra did that to get one last little bit of life out of the ISDN infrastructure that nobody wanted anymore. They took that option away a few years ago, but fortunately I'm on ADSL now.
My mum was using dialup as little as 12 months ago, until she got her two-way satellite connection. I find that the quality of modems these days is pretty awful. The people in Australia who use them typically use them because they are too far away from the exchange to get anything else, which means the signals are travelling over copper that could be decades old. You need a good modem which can adjust its impedance settings and keep tuning to the line characteristics for that to work at reasonable speeds.
Or, instead of banning weapons, what about mandating that everyone flying MUST carry a knife with them?
I carry a bomb. The chance of there being more than one bomb on a plane is astronomical and since i don't plan to detonate mine, i feel much safer. If you want to try this, make sure your bomb is clearly labeled and declare it before you board - they don't like you bringing bombs on a plane unannounced.
It's funny isn't it... It took 10 years for someone to read the boot rom of the Super Game Boy (and similar time for the Game Boy?), but the XBox was hacked in a similar fashion much faster.
I think if it takes 10 years for someone to break it then it could be deemed secure... the trouble with that is that it's only true retrospectively:)
A great dilemma for the Flying Spaghetti Monster. With His Noodly Appendage he could gently push the asteroid aside and save the believers, but he would also be saving the non-believers, reinforcing their belief in their phony-balony god.
That's an approximation for a 50% probability though... right? I'd be more inclined to think that anything over a one-in-a-million probability of a collision is unacceptably high, as a collision would break things, but that's what i'm too lazy to figure out. It's not purely a maths problem.
It's quite well known that MD5 shouldn't be used for anything privacy related, given the fact that it's been exploited quite publicly in recent history.
An email address isn't private... I suspect that MD5 was just a convenient way to get a fixed length id. I'd be more worried about collisions, but i'm too lazy to calculate how many avatars would be required before that might become a problem.
That's what they say now, but how long until they start assembling weapons of mass destruction? I don't think we can take the chance - the only peaceful thing to do is wipe them all out _now_.
Not so few as you might think. At 0.01G, we're talking about 100 years as measured by clocks on the ship.
I think the bigger problem is that 10 years after we launch that one, technology will improve and we'll be able to send one at 0.02G, which will overtake the first one.
The key is that with the proposed drive you don't run out of reaction mass...so you can keep accelerating as long as you have energy.
Kind of like the photon drive where you can keep accelerating as long as you have energy?
I can't help but wonder if the energy required to turn these particles around isn't the missing side of the energy ledger that stops it being a reactionless drive.
Slashdot Mirror
Your solution doesn't work.
It fails on new years eve if someone is in a different time zone or if their clock is slightly off.
You need to talk to Microsoft - they could have used someone like you when they were building their 'stampinf' tool that I can't use until 10am in the morning (11am during DST) because it stamps UTC which then confuses another tool in the build chain...
4) Code must always be 'self documenting' ('would you rather use a one-liner that requires a 3-line comment, or a 10-liner that requires no comments?').
Or to put some more straw in it "would you rather use a one-liner that requires 1 character of comments, or a 1 billion-liner that requires no comments".
If your 1 line of code is so complicated that it takes 10 lines to write it out in a way that is easily understood, then 3 lines of comments is probably not going to do it justice.
Wasn't one of the mantra's of the humorous Job Security paper that someone published a while back that you should comment only the obvious stuff, eg:
while (i epsilon(n)) // increment i by 1
{
i += (j + 47) * 55 - sqrt(r) + j * j - r * r - pom();
}
i++;
Myself, I comment next to nothing unless I suspect that I won't know what I was thinking if I come back to the code in 6 months. If I come back to code in 6 months and can't remember what it does or why it does it that way, I'll put comments in for next time.
You should install the RickBlockPlus browser addon to prevent this sort of thing happening.
winning the lottery
Nobody ever wins the lottery anyway. I took a quick sample of the subset of the population that participated in lotteries and none of them had ever won, and by extrapolating that data I was able to prove that nobody had ever won a lottery ever.
Some other studies have been done that came to different conclusions but I believe that their data collection methodology was flawed as their results didn't agree with mine, so I think they can be safely excluded.
Because Apophis is under observation we know exactly what the risk is.
Aren't some of them a bit unpredictable due to the ejection of matter (eg steam) as they get closer to the sun? Or maybe i've been reading too much SciFi.
The real risks come from objects we are not currently observing.
That's certainly true. Wasn't there one that came pretty close recently that we only noticed as it was leaving?
The TSA's list of prohibited items doesn't seem to have changed in the last day, though.
Explosive devices aren't already listed?
I was using dialup as little as 5 years ago. I was too far from the exchange for ADSL and ISDN was too expensive. Then Telstra introduced a plan where you paid about $100/month for BRI ISDN, giving you 2 64K channels. So I could be surfing at 128K unless someone wanted to use the phone in which case it would drop back to 64K. Better than my 33K modem! I assume Telstra did that to get one last little bit of life out of the ISDN infrastructure that nobody wanted anymore. They took that option away a few years ago, but fortunately I'm on ADSL now.
My mum was using dialup as little as 12 months ago, until she got her two-way satellite connection. I find that the quality of modems these days is pretty awful. The people in Australia who use them typically use them because they are too far away from the exchange to get anything else, which means the signals are travelling over copper that could be decades old. You need a good modem which can adjust its impedance settings and keep tuning to the line characteristics for that to work at reasonable speeds.
Or, instead of banning weapons, what about mandating that everyone flying MUST carry a knife with them?
I carry a bomb. The chance of there being more than one bomb on a plane is astronomical and since i don't plan to detonate mine, i feel much safer. If you want to try this, make sure your bomb is clearly labeled and declare it before you board - they don't like you bringing bombs on a plane unannounced.
It's funny isn't it... It took 10 years for someone to read the boot rom of the Super Game Boy (and similar time for the Game Boy?), but the XBox was hacked in a similar fashion much faster.
I think if it takes 10 years for someone to break it then it could be deemed secure... the trouble with that is that it's only true retrospectively :)
That's the worst idea i've ever heard. What the hell are you smoking?
praying to a nonexistent god
A great dilemma for the Flying Spaghetti Monster. With His Noodly Appendage he could gently push the asteroid aside and save the believers, but he would also be saving the non-believers, reinforcing their belief in their phony-balony god.
No, if we as a species ever come across a crisis that requires us all to co-operate to survive, we're as good as dead.
Yes. If you watch what's going on in Copenhagen right now, it's a pretty good example of how an asteroid impact event will be handled, only more so.
2^128^.5 = 2^64
Phew, I'll have to take a break after that one.
That's an approximation for a 50% probability though... right? I'd be more inclined to think that anything over a one-in-a-million probability of a collision is unacceptably high, as a collision would break things, but that's what i'm too lazy to figure out. It's not purely a maths problem.
It's quite well known that MD5 shouldn't be used for anything privacy related, given the fact that it's been exploited quite publicly in recent history.
An email address isn't private... I suspect that MD5 was just a convenient way to get a fixed length id. I'd be more worried about collisions, but i'm too lazy to calculate how many avatars would be required before that might become a problem.
That's what they say now, but how long until they start assembling weapons of mass destruction? I don't think we can take the chance - the only peaceful thing to do is wipe them all out _now_.
the real headline ought to be: "Mother ejects baby in uncomplicated delivery"
What on earth has the mother got to do with it???
Not so few as you might think. At 0.01G, we're talking about 100 years as measured by clocks on the ship.
I think the bigger problem is that 10 years after we launch that one, technology will improve and we'll be able to send one at 0.02G, which will overtake the first one.
I'd also bet that there would be no shortage of volunteers for a no going back, one way, first contact trip
I'd wonder that anyone who would volunteer for such a trip might not be mentally stable enough to qualify.
Also, in another 10 years we'll be able to build a better probe that would probably overtake the one we sent now anyway...
Not so much a problem for the folks on the spacecraft, relativity can make the journey very manageable for them.
I think we're a long way off building a spaceship that can achieve the speeds where that effect would make any difference.
But not the power to stop them making it.
Sorry AC - that's what you get when you have free will
- God
Stop playing on slashdot and get back to work
- your boss.
The key is that with the proposed drive you don't run out of reaction mass...so you can keep accelerating as long as you have energy.
Kind of like the photon drive where you can keep accelerating as long as you have energy?
I can't help but wonder if the energy required to turn these particles around isn't the missing side of the energy ledger that stops it being a reactionless drive.