"This history of co-processors for specific jobs has never been a very happy or long-lived one."
Seems to me that GPU's have been around for a pretty long time, are generally pretty successful at what they do, and people are more-or-less happy with them. Perhaps, though, they are the exception that proves the rule.
Anyone know if this is a generalized solution, or an implementation in silicon of specific algorithms? I'm not terribly fond of the idea of specific algorithms being implemented in silicon, simply because, what happens if a weakness is found in the algorithm(s) being used, and they need to be changed? There was an article posted not too long ago to slashdot, about someone beginning to find weaknesses in AES. One of the problems with 'fixing' any flaws found in AES (one 'easy' solution being proffered in that particular case, IIRC, was to just increase the number of 'rounds' that the data is passed through the algorithm, or something like that) is that *any change at all* will be unsupported by specific implementations in hardware.
OTOH, if someone came up with a coprocessor which worked in conjunction with software/firmware (sort of a 'programmable' encryption co-processor) where you could update algorithms, or even use entirely new algorithms, that would be, I suspect, very useful.
They've always been control freaks. Really, I have ZERO sympathy for people who buy Apple then don't like it when Apple exercises control over them. It's not like this is a sudden change in behavior from Apple. This is pretty consistent with the way they have done business since, I dunno, 1984(?) or whenever the original Mac came out.
Also, don't forget that even though you might own the phone, Apple owns the App Store, and Apple owns the software on it (software is [almost] never sold - the software is 'owned' by the copyright holder, and is licensed to end users). When you buy an Apple iPhone, you *know* up front that the software is designed to only allow you to obtain new software via the Apple App Store, and Apple has control of the App Store. It is definitely *their* App Store. If they don't want to offer Google's software via the App Store, they have no legal obligation to offer it. If that makes it so that *you* can't get Google's app on *your* iPhone, maybe you shouldn't have gotten an iPhone to begin with.
Get a phone from a provider that either, A) offers a completely open 'App Store', or B) the phone allows you to download software from any website, like BlackBerries do.
I cannot stress this enough - buyers are responsible for making informed purchases. If you are considering buying an Apple iPhone, and don't like the way the iPhone works (in this case, that you can only get software through the 'official' Apple App Store), DON'T BUY THE iPhone.
I have not, and do not plan to, buy an iPhone because, frankly, it just isn't what I want. It's too much of an Apple product, with the 'hood welded shut'. I don't like products like that, but some people do.
That only leaves the problem of people mod'ing the phones so they can load software from anywhere. While I think, from a personal opinion standpoint, that should be perfectly OK, it might not actually be legal to modify the software on the phone, because of possible DMCA complications. What is right, and what is legal, is often quite different.
5. Now that they accept credit cards, they can raise rates whatever they currently charge when you pay with coins, up to significantly higher rates (I mean, it's hard to get people to pay $4.00 or $6.00/hr with quarters)? I'm guessing significant rate hikes will be following soon, if they didn't raise the rates immediately when installing the new meters. Also, I notice in one of the main article links, that some of the meters are now billing 24/7/365 - in the past, evenings and weekends were typically free. Just that alone makes this a significant 'rate hike' on parking meters.
6. Automatic/Semi-Automatic ticketting? They don't really advertise this as a 'user-friendly' feature of the meters, but I'm guessing these 'smart meters' make it so that, pretty much, you'll never get lucky and avoid a ticket/fine. Go 15 minutes over the amount of time you bought? Tough luck - you owe $50 parking ticket. (You know, I think this might bring up an interesting potential legal argument - in the past, large fines were accepted by courts because, in the general case, cities could not get a 100% ticketting rate, so tickets were to discourage people from cheating the meters in the first place; but, if you now have meters that are impossible to cheat, wouldn't $50 fines for parking violations constitute an unconstitionally excessive penalty, if the 'actual damages' from not paying enough to the meter were just a few dollars?)
I've been trying to think about this problem over the past couple days, and your response about turning the sail. The problem which keeps occurring to me, and which doesn't seem like your 'solution' addresses, is that when you are no longer close to the sun, the force from the sun will be very small, and may not be sufficient to make course corrections? I'm not really sure about that, but it really seems like, with a Solar Sail, you gotta get it right early, because the closer you get to the 'destination', the less power there is available to make course corrections (with the sail, at least).
I have a question: how do they know they've been watching long enough for the large-magnitude waves? Is it because string theory also predicts the period-length of the 'bursts of gravitational waves', and we've been watching for at least one whole period?
But, the design for the equipment followed logically from the model, right? Now, of course, it's possible that someone screwed up in the design so that it doesn't *accurately* reflect the model, but, *if* the design is a faithful implementation of the model, and the design fails to detect what it's supposed to detect, then there might be a flaw with the model, right?
I guess what I'm trying to say is that, while you're right that a flaw with the equipment might cause failure, it's equally true that a flaw with the model would cause equipment failure as a direct consequence, no?
How does *failing* to find the thing which was predicted to exist by Einstein, prove Einstein right? Granted, they weren't *expecting* to see gravitational waves at this point, because they were only looking for waves which would have been at such a high magnitude that they weren't expected to exist *except by string theorists* because of part of string theory. So, that part of string theory was *dis-proved*, but Einstein's theory has not yet been proved correct (though they expect it will be 'soon' when they start looking for smaller magnitude waves).
Anyhow, what's wrong with proving that our ideas about the natural universe are either correct or incorrect (or somewhere in between, in some cases)? You know, one never knows all the applications of scientific knowledge until long after that knowledge is obtained. Perhaps spending all this money now to do this science today, will lay the groundwork for very useful applications in the future? Perhaps the knowledge gained from these observatories will help us figure out how to make fusion work economically, or help us develop more advanced spacecraft, or even more advanced terrestrial vehicles? Or help us detect the aliens which are spying on us with advanced cloaking devices but can't hide their G-waves (ok, that last is mostly a joke, but one never knows)?
Scientific knowledge is, in itself, largely useful - how much has our technology and economy, our health and standard of living, improved, because of scientific advances achieved in past centuries that are only now being put to great use?
I see your point, and if you consider *Adams's* later work inferior, that can diminish it. But let's face it, with this other guy who just wrote this new HHGTG novel, since it wasn't from Adams, people who don't like it can just ignore it and say 'that never happened'.
I went through this last year with the TV series "Legend of the Seeker", which purported to be an adaptation of the series of novels called the "Sword of Truth" series. Because of the TV show, I learned of the books, and read the books. The books were awesome (mostly - some better than others, of course), but the TV show kind of sucked. Does that make the Sword of Truth any less good, just because the TV show was pretty lame? Not to me, at least. (Although, it does mean that nobody else can come along and make a *good* adaptation for TV or movies, because ABC/Disney, who produced the show, secured exclusive TV/Movie rights, which is a shame).
A fiction author's legacy, is, largely, the books and universe (characters, settings, etc) that the author created. Someone else attempting to add to that and not doing a good job doesn't make the work that came before any less good.
Even with your example with the Matrix, the first Matrix movie is still a great movie, even if the sequels were a bit of a let-down.
Ok, I may misunderstand the nature of the 'cure', but generally viruses are 'cured' with vaccinations, right? But, viruses mutate and the vaccine becomes either less effective or ineffective, giving the pharma company the possibility to create *another* version of the vaccine (and they probably get a new patent on it), so viruses are a virtual goldmine anyhow. Why would you sit on a vaccine for any virus? It's not like, just because you innoculate people against the currently dominant strain of herpes simplex, that there won't be a new version in 10-20 years (just about the time that revenues are falling off from the current version, and the patent's about to expire).
I see no financial reason *NOT* to sell a vaccine against a virus - it's the perfect product, because you *must* get a new version every few years/decades. (In the case of influenza, they create a new version *every year* because it mutates so fast).
Hey, just because *you're* not as good as Jimi Hendrix or Picasso doesn't mean that there is NOBODY in a planet with approx 6 Billion people that could make music in the same style as Jimi Hendrix, and do a good job of it. Or paint in a similar style to Picasso and be brilliant at it.
The difference here is that, with music, there's no point is calling your album the "next Jimi Hendrix" album (unless you just want to be ridiculed by people), because music is essentially stand-alone. With fiction, you can certainly go write you own completely original (well, ok, there's no such thing as a *completely original* work of fiction, but you know what I mean), but that doesn't mean other people can't write perfectly good stories using your character and setting. I hear there are some pretty good Star Wars books that weren't written by George Lucas. I also hear there are some good Star Trek books which weren't written by Gene Roddenberry. Go to any bookstore, and you will find a whole shelf full of Forgotten Realms books, by a cadre of different authors, and they seems to be, for the most part, well received by fans of Forgotten Realms.
People get all bent out of shape about other authors stepping in and writing works in a dead (or sometimes living) authors 'universe', but I don't understand how the Colfer guy writing a book makes Adams's books any less good than they already were? Nothing this guy can do can hurt Adams's legacy, so just go sit down, and maybe take some valium or prozac or something.
Since Pi is irrational, does that mean that a "perfect" circle cannot actually exist? If you don't understand my question, think about it like this. Let's say I want to construct a circle of radius R. To create a "perfect" circle, it seems like I would need a length of material to build the circle out of that was exactly 2*Pi*R, but since Pi is irrational, it seems that you could never actually get any length which is an exact multiple of Pi? If Pi really expands out infinitely, even a circle with a radius the size of a galaxy, or a cluster of galaxies, could never be *exactly* the right length?
I think you can get around this problem, maybe, by creating an 'image' of a floppy disc, then either burning it to a CDROM (using mastering software that knows how to make a bootable CDROM from an image file), or writing it to a usb flash drive?
I wonder, how practical is Solar power past pluto?
I seem to recall from one of my physics classes, a discussion about point sources of light and other EM fields, that as your distance from an object doubles, the 'density' of the field becomes 1/4. My point is, that outside the Solar System, you're so far from the Sun, that wouldn't the density of light at that distance (and thus, the amount of light/power that is hitting your solar cells) be very very very small?
1) If the solar sail is your means of propulsion, do you include some sort of 'conventional' rockets to make your course adjustments? Can course adjustments somehow be made with the sail itself? It's not like a ship with a solar sail has a rudder. If not with the sail, how are you making those corrections.
2) Efficiency - getting the correct path to start with means you'll get there sooner. Perhaps a LOT sooner, because making course corrections might have the effect of slowing down spacecraft some, and even if you don't have to slow down the craft, making course corrections implies you are not taking the most optimal route. But, hey, what's a few extra AU between friends? Oh yeah, that's right, it's the difference between getting the craft to the correct place, and having it shoot by a few hundred million kilometers off to the side. I'm sure no one will mind if that multi-billion dollar space mission gets lost in space having missed it's objective.
In eve, your 'class' is largely a function of what ship you have and how you have outfitted it. So, you can pretty easily switch ships and 'change class', but when you are actually out in the game, in a particular ship, you are limited to what you can do by what your ship can do. Final Fantasy XI is sort of similar - you can go back to a city or village and change 'jobs' whenever you like, but when you are any given job, you can only do the things that job/class can do.
Easily switching classes is altogether different from a 'classless' system where anyone can do anything at any time as long as they have learned how to do it, and have whatever resources are required.
While I do agree that it's a little, I dunno, unfair to the students, I would point out that the schools can and do give them 'athletic scholarships', including tuition, room, board, and possibly other expenses. At a lot of these large Universities, that package deal could be worth something like $30,000 - $60,000 year (maybe more at some, I'm not sure). They can get all the free food, soda, and coffee they want at the University dining services, included in their 'scholarship'. Heck, it wouldn't surprise me if these Universities had very nice, very exclusive dining halls just for their elite athletic students with better food and coffee than the 'normal' students get, you know, the people who are at the University to actually *study* things like science, engineering, mathematics, language arts, literature, history, etc. The University could, I'm sure, 'contract' with Starbucks to provide coffee for their football and basketball players, with no repurcussions for the players.
Why do people care if there is nuclear waste or leakage, or a meltdown, or whatever, *on the moon*? There's no life on the moon for us to hurt? What does a bunch of moon dust care if there is some radioactive isotopes mixed in with the rest of the soil?
I would imagine the point of this is to have a reliable power source when the sun's not shining? According to Physlink the Lunar day/night cycle is 28.5 earth-days long. So, you would have about 14 days of darkness between 14 days of light. Not, perhaps, the best place for a solar power solution? That's not to say that Solar couldn't play an important role in providing a lot of additional power, but it's always good to have some kind of backup, no?
Nuclear seems more practical, for this particular application than, say, diesel, since a single fueling could provide power for years.
"I suspect that it DOESN'T, in which case they'll need to bore a big hole to put the heat in via fluid transferring to lunar dirt."
Ok, so what's the problem? Dig a trench in the lunar soil, and bury a heat exchanger down in the soil. Dump heat into lunar soil, which will pretty soon radiate it out into space. Is that a problem? Seems like a very simple, easy, cheap (well, kind of expensive to send a trench digger to the moon, I suppose, but once it's there, it's there) solution?
Why would you send the reactor up *activated*? The only part of the reactor that's really of any concern is the fuel - enriched uranium. So, maybe the answer is to send the uranium up in little bits, so that even if it *did* blow up, there's such a small amount of non-reacted fuel (I might be wrong, but if I understand the nuclear fuel cycle, it shouldn't be very dangerous if it hasn't been reacted yet, and there's not a sufficient quantity to start a reaction?)
Can someone who knows more comment on whether I'm right or not? My understanding is that small quantities of unreacted uranium scattered in the atmosphere would pose essentially zero risk to life on earth?
If so, then you only assemble the reactor, insert the fuel, and initiate fission once it reaches the moon, at which point, who cares? I'm sure, having little atmosphere and no magnetic field to protect it, the moon must be subjected to a heck of a lot of radiation all the time, anyhow, no?
I think the US is being consistent here - while they may allow casinos, they don't allow anyone, if I understand correctly, to run online gambling. No one in the US can run online gambling legally, so why should it be legal for people in other countries to run online gambling businesses that do business with people in the US.
If Antigua or anyone else wants to open casinos within their own territory, the US isn't doing anything to stop them. If Antigua wants to offer gambling to people in other countries *other than* the USA, and those other countries make it legal (or it's already legal), fine.
As for why Americans are hated everywhere, I really doubt it has much to do with online gambling. While I'm sure your right in the general sense (that America is viewed as arrogant because they have ignored UN or WTO rules or rulings; i.e. unilateral war in Iraq, and I'm sure many other examples of *serious* things), I really doubt many people really care about this *particular* issue.
Slashdot Mirror
"This history of co-processors for specific jobs has never been a very happy or long-lived one."
Seems to me that GPU's have been around for a pretty long time, are generally pretty successful at what they do, and people are more-or-less happy with them. Perhaps, though, they are the exception that proves the rule.
Anyone know if this is a generalized solution, or an implementation in silicon of specific algorithms? I'm not terribly fond of the idea of specific algorithms being implemented in silicon, simply because, what happens if a weakness is found in the algorithm(s) being used, and they need to be changed? There was an article posted not too long ago to slashdot, about someone beginning to find weaknesses in AES. One of the problems with 'fixing' any flaws found in AES (one 'easy' solution being proffered in that particular case, IIRC, was to just increase the number of 'rounds' that the data is passed through the algorithm, or something like that) is that *any change at all* will be unsupported by specific implementations in hardware.
OTOH, if someone came up with a coprocessor which worked in conjunction with software/firmware (sort of a 'programmable' encryption co-processor) where you could update algorithms, or even use entirely new algorithms, that would be, I suspect, very useful.
"I loaded the movies into a RAM disk and set the hard drive to power down, shut off syslog, and removed the DVD drive completely."
Aren't full-length DVDs something on the order of 8GB? How much RAM does your laptop have?
They've always been control freaks. Really, I have ZERO sympathy for people who buy Apple then don't like it when Apple exercises control over them. It's not like this is a sudden change in behavior from Apple. This is pretty consistent with the way they have done business since, I dunno, 1984(?) or whenever the original Mac came out.
Also, don't forget that even though you might own the phone, Apple owns the App Store, and Apple owns the software on it (software is [almost] never sold - the software is 'owned' by the copyright holder, and is licensed to end users). When you buy an Apple iPhone, you *know* up front that the software is designed to only allow you to obtain new software via the Apple App Store, and Apple has control of the App Store. It is definitely *their* App Store. If they don't want to offer Google's software via the App Store, they have no legal obligation to offer it. If that makes it so that *you* can't get Google's app on *your* iPhone, maybe you shouldn't have gotten an iPhone to begin with.
Get a phone from a provider that either, A) offers a completely open 'App Store', or B) the phone allows you to download software from any website, like BlackBerries do.
I cannot stress this enough - buyers are responsible for making informed purchases. If you are considering buying an Apple iPhone, and don't like the way the iPhone works (in this case, that you can only get software through the 'official' Apple App Store), DON'T BUY THE iPhone.
I have not, and do not plan to, buy an iPhone because, frankly, it just isn't what I want. It's too much of an Apple product, with the 'hood welded shut'. I don't like products like that, but some people do.
That only leaves the problem of people mod'ing the phones so they can load software from anywhere. While I think, from a personal opinion standpoint, that should be perfectly OK, it might not actually be legal to modify the software on the phone, because of possible DMCA complications. What is right, and what is legal, is often quite different.
5. Now that they accept credit cards, they can raise rates whatever they currently charge when you pay with coins, up to significantly higher rates (I mean, it's hard to get people to pay $4.00 or $6.00/hr with quarters)? I'm guessing significant rate hikes will be following soon, if they didn't raise the rates immediately when installing the new meters. Also, I notice in one of the main article links, that some of the meters are now billing 24/7/365 - in the past, evenings and weekends were typically free. Just that alone makes this a significant 'rate hike' on parking meters.
6. Automatic/Semi-Automatic ticketting? They don't really advertise this as a 'user-friendly' feature of the meters, but I'm guessing these 'smart meters' make it so that, pretty much, you'll never get lucky and avoid a ticket/fine. Go 15 minutes over the amount of time you bought? Tough luck - you owe $50 parking ticket. (You know, I think this might bring up an interesting potential legal argument - in the past, large fines were accepted by courts because, in the general case, cities could not get a 100% ticketting rate, so tickets were to discourage people from cheating the meters in the first place; but, if you now have meters that are impossible to cheat, wouldn't $50 fines for parking violations constitute an unconstitionally excessive penalty, if the 'actual damages' from not paying enough to the meter were just a few dollars?)
I've been trying to think about this problem over the past couple days, and your response about turning the sail. The problem which keeps occurring to me, and which doesn't seem like your 'solution' addresses, is that when you are no longer close to the sun, the force from the sun will be very small, and may not be sufficient to make course corrections? I'm not really sure about that, but it really seems like, with a Solar Sail, you gotta get it right early, because the closer you get to the 'destination', the less power there is available to make course corrections (with the sail, at least).
I have a question: how do they know they've been watching long enough for the large-magnitude waves? Is it because string theory also predicts the period-length of the 'bursts of gravitational waves', and we've been watching for at least one whole period?
But, the design for the equipment followed logically from the model, right? Now, of course, it's possible that someone screwed up in the design so that it doesn't *accurately* reflect the model, but, *if* the design is a faithful implementation of the model, and the design fails to detect what it's supposed to detect, then there might be a flaw with the model, right?
I guess what I'm trying to say is that, while you're right that a flaw with the equipment might cause failure, it's equally true that a flaw with the model would cause equipment failure as a direct consequence, no?
How does *failing* to find the thing which was predicted to exist by Einstein, prove Einstein right? Granted, they weren't *expecting* to see gravitational waves at this point, because they were only looking for waves which would have been at such a high magnitude that they weren't expected to exist *except by string theorists* because of part of string theory. So, that part of string theory was *dis-proved*, but Einstein's theory has not yet been proved correct (though they expect it will be 'soon' when they start looking for smaller magnitude waves).
Anyhow, what's wrong with proving that our ideas about the natural universe are either correct or incorrect (or somewhere in between, in some cases)? You know, one never knows all the applications of scientific knowledge until long after that knowledge is obtained. Perhaps spending all this money now to do this science today, will lay the groundwork for very useful applications in the future? Perhaps the knowledge gained from these observatories will help us figure out how to make fusion work economically, or help us develop more advanced spacecraft, or even more advanced terrestrial vehicles? Or help us detect the aliens which are spying on us with advanced cloaking devices but can't hide their G-waves (ok, that last is mostly a joke, but one never knows)?
Scientific knowledge is, in itself, largely useful - how much has our technology and economy, our health and standard of living, improved, because of scientific advances achieved in past centuries that are only now being put to great use?
I see your point, and if you consider *Adams's* later work inferior, that can diminish it. But let's face it, with this other guy who just wrote this new HHGTG novel, since it wasn't from Adams, people who don't like it can just ignore it and say 'that never happened'.
I went through this last year with the TV series "Legend of the Seeker", which purported to be an adaptation of the series of novels called the "Sword of Truth" series. Because of the TV show, I learned of the books, and read the books. The books were awesome (mostly - some better than others, of course), but the TV show kind of sucked. Does that make the Sword of Truth any less good, just because the TV show was pretty lame? Not to me, at least. (Although, it does mean that nobody else can come along and make a *good* adaptation for TV or movies, because ABC/Disney, who produced the show, secured exclusive TV/Movie rights, which is a shame).
A fiction author's legacy, is, largely, the books and universe (characters, settings, etc) that the author created. Someone else attempting to add to that and not doing a good job doesn't make the work that came before any less good.
Even with your example with the Matrix, the first Matrix movie is still a great movie, even if the sequels were a bit of a let-down.
Ok, I may misunderstand the nature of the 'cure', but generally viruses are 'cured' with vaccinations, right? But, viruses mutate and the vaccine becomes either less effective or ineffective, giving the pharma company the possibility to create *another* version of the vaccine (and they probably get a new patent on it), so viruses are a virtual goldmine anyhow. Why would you sit on a vaccine for any virus? It's not like, just because you innoculate people against the currently dominant strain of herpes simplex, that there won't be a new version in 10-20 years (just about the time that revenues are falling off from the current version, and the patent's about to expire).
I see no financial reason *NOT* to sell a vaccine against a virus - it's the perfect product, because you *must* get a new version every few years/decades. (In the case of influenza, they create a new version *every year* because it mutates so fast).
Hey, just because *you're* not as good as Jimi Hendrix or Picasso doesn't mean that there is NOBODY in a planet with approx 6 Billion people that could make music in the same style as Jimi Hendrix, and do a good job of it. Or paint in a similar style to Picasso and be brilliant at it.
The difference here is that, with music, there's no point is calling your album the "next Jimi Hendrix" album (unless you just want to be ridiculed by people), because music is essentially stand-alone. With fiction, you can certainly go write you own completely original (well, ok, there's no such thing as a *completely original* work of fiction, but you know what I mean), but that doesn't mean other people can't write perfectly good stories using your character and setting. I hear there are some pretty good Star Wars books that weren't written by George Lucas. I also hear there are some good Star Trek books which weren't written by Gene Roddenberry. Go to any bookstore, and you will find a whole shelf full of Forgotten Realms books, by a cadre of different authors, and they seems to be, for the most part, well received by fans of Forgotten Realms.
People get all bent out of shape about other authors stepping in and writing works in a dead (or sometimes living) authors 'universe', but I don't understand how the Colfer guy writing a book makes Adams's books any less good than they already were? Nothing this guy can do can hurt Adams's legacy, so just go sit down, and maybe take some valium or prozac or something.
But to construct the circumference perfectly, wouldn't you have to have a fraction of an atom in the perimeter somewhere?
Since Pi is irrational, does that mean that a "perfect" circle cannot actually exist? If you don't understand my question, think about it like this. Let's say I want to construct a circle of radius R. To create a "perfect" circle, it seems like I would need a length of material to build the circle out of that was exactly 2*Pi*R, but since Pi is irrational, it seems that you could never actually get any length which is an exact multiple of Pi? If Pi really expands out infinitely, even a circle with a radius the size of a galaxy, or a cluster of galaxies, could never be *exactly* the right length?
I think you can get around this problem, maybe, by creating an 'image' of a floppy disc, then either burning it to a CDROM (using mastering software that knows how to make a bootable CDROM from an image file), or writing it to a usb flash drive?
I wonder, how practical is Solar power past pluto?
I seem to recall from one of my physics classes, a discussion about point sources of light and other EM fields, that as your distance from an object doubles, the 'density' of the field becomes 1/4. My point is, that outside the Solar System, you're so far from the Sun, that wouldn't the density of light at that distance (and thus, the amount of light/power that is hitting your solar cells) be very very very small?
2 thoughts come to mind:
1) If the solar sail is your means of propulsion, do you include some sort of 'conventional' rockets to make your course adjustments? Can course adjustments somehow be made with the sail itself? It's not like a ship with a solar sail has a rudder. If not with the sail, how are you making those corrections.
2) Efficiency - getting the correct path to start with means you'll get there sooner. Perhaps a LOT sooner, because making course corrections might have the effect of slowing down spacecraft some, and even if you don't have to slow down the craft, making course corrections implies you are not taking the most optimal route. But, hey, what's a few extra AU between friends? Oh yeah, that's right, it's the difference between getting the craft to the correct place, and having it shoot by a few hundred million kilometers off to the side. I'm sure no one will mind if that multi-billion dollar space mission gets lost in space having missed it's objective.
In eve, your 'class' is largely a function of what ship you have and how you have outfitted it. So, you can pretty easily switch ships and 'change class', but when you are actually out in the game, in a particular ship, you are limited to what you can do by what your ship can do. Final Fantasy XI is sort of similar - you can go back to a city or village and change 'jobs' whenever you like, but when you are any given job, you can only do the things that job/class can do.
Easily switching classes is altogether different from a 'classless' system where anyone can do anything at any time as long as they have learned how to do it, and have whatever resources are required.
While I do agree that it's a little, I dunno, unfair to the students, I would point out that the schools can and do give them 'athletic scholarships', including tuition, room, board, and possibly other expenses. At a lot of these large Universities, that package deal could be worth something like $30,000 - $60,000 year (maybe more at some, I'm not sure). They can get all the free food, soda, and coffee they want at the University dining services, included in their 'scholarship'. Heck, it wouldn't surprise me if these Universities had very nice, very exclusive dining halls just for their elite athletic students with better food and coffee than the 'normal' students get, you know, the people who are at the University to actually *study* things like science, engineering, mathematics, language arts, literature, history, etc. The University could, I'm sure, 'contract' with Starbucks to provide coffee for their football and basketball players, with no repurcussions for the players.
Why do people care if there is nuclear waste or leakage, or a meltdown, or whatever, *on the moon*? There's no life on the moon for us to hurt? What does a bunch of moon dust care if there is some radioactive isotopes mixed in with the rest of the soil?
I would imagine the point of this is to have a reliable power source when the sun's not shining? According to Physlink the Lunar day/night cycle is 28.5 earth-days long. So, you would have about 14 days of darkness between 14 days of light. Not, perhaps, the best place for a solar power solution? That's not to say that Solar couldn't play an important role in providing a lot of additional power, but it's always good to have some kind of backup, no?
Nuclear seems more practical, for this particular application than, say, diesel, since a single fueling could provide power for years.
"I suspect that it DOESN'T, in which case they'll need to bore a big hole to put the heat in via fluid transferring to lunar dirt."
Ok, so what's the problem? Dig a trench in the lunar soil, and bury a heat exchanger down in the soil. Dump heat into lunar soil, which will pretty soon radiate it out into space. Is that a problem? Seems like a very simple, easy, cheap (well, kind of expensive to send a trench digger to the moon, I suppose, but once it's there, it's there) solution?
Why would you send the reactor up *activated*? The only part of the reactor that's really of any concern is the fuel - enriched uranium. So, maybe the answer is to send the uranium up in little bits, so that even if it *did* blow up, there's such a small amount of non-reacted fuel (I might be wrong, but if I understand the nuclear fuel cycle, it shouldn't be very dangerous if it hasn't been reacted yet, and there's not a sufficient quantity to start a reaction?)
Can someone who knows more comment on whether I'm right or not? My understanding is that small quantities of unreacted uranium scattered in the atmosphere would pose essentially zero risk to life on earth?
If so, then you only assemble the reactor, insert the fuel, and initiate fission once it reaches the moon, at which point, who cares? I'm sure, having little atmosphere and no magnetic field to protect it, the moon must be subjected to a heck of a lot of radiation all the time, anyhow, no?
I think the US is being consistent here - while they may allow casinos, they don't allow anyone, if I understand correctly, to run online gambling. No one in the US can run online gambling legally, so why should it be legal for people in other countries to run online gambling businesses that do business with people in the US.
If Antigua or anyone else wants to open casinos within their own territory, the US isn't doing anything to stop them. If Antigua wants to offer gambling to people in other countries *other than* the USA, and those other countries make it legal (or it's already legal), fine.
As for why Americans are hated everywhere, I really doubt it has much to do with online gambling. While I'm sure your right in the general sense (that America is viewed as arrogant because they have ignored UN or WTO rules or rulings; i.e. unilateral war in Iraq, and I'm sure many other examples of *serious* things), I really doubt many people really care about this *particular* issue.