If I had mod points, I would mod you down. Not only do you demonstrate a complete disdain for whoever you think is "inferior," you show a complete lack of understanding for the issues in the middle east.
There is no "inferiority complex" in the middle east. They aren't emo kids running around threatening to slit their wrists. It just so happens that their standards of living are ridiculously low compared to the standards of living of "the west," not directly due to us, but partially. If you grew up there, you'd be looking for someone to blame, and their government provides "the great satan" as a convenient scapegoat. Further proving their point, "the great satan's puppet in the region," (aka israel) has just rampaged through lebanon, destroying civilian targets like bridges, hospitals, and airports, further degrading their quality of life. it's lack of understanding of the kind that you have just demonstrated that has brought us into the current situation in iraq and afghanistan, as well as the US unspoken nod to israel to rampage across the middle east.
this in no way relevant to the situations of mac users, who just happen to have a different OS preference. your above statement would be like saying that whenever an african american person acts stereotypically black (whatever you might define that as) they are acting out of a feeling of self-inferiority.
Unfortunately, as soon as you leave the atmosphere (which is usually defined to end at 100 km above sea level), the blimps stop working. Geosynchronous orbit lies at 35,000 km above sea level, and the counterweight would have to extend even further.
Not a rocket scientist, but a rocket scientist in training (junior aerospace major at the university of colorado).
Almost all space elevator designs have a counterweight that extends past geosynchronous orbit. This balances the equation (gravity, centripetal acceleration) so that the thing doesn't fall out of the sky. The center of mass isn't exactly at geosynchronous, but the force balances out there, so that's the orbit it stays in. The counterweight has an additional perk in that if you continue up the elevator to the counterweight's altitude, and then let go, you are now flying away from the earth at greater than escape velocity. Free ride to anywhere in (the plane of) the solar system.
To address your second point, the ribbon isn't traveling through the atmosphere. From the point of view of the earth (and the atmosphere), the ribbon is stationary. Not much drag there, unless there's a lot of wind. Also, the atmospheric drag and the weight of an object traveling up the ribbon are inconsequential because the ribbon is under tension. A counterweight at an altitude of 2x geosynchronous (rounding a little) is traveling at about 6 km/s. this requires a centripetal acceleration of 400 km/s^2 to keep it there (remember, it's not in orbit, as gravity isn't the only thing keeping it moving in a circle. the ribbon is pulling on it too). the load applied by the crawler and all the other forces (atmospheric drag, etc) are negligible compared to the tension in the ribbon applied by the counterweight balancing them out.
so no. no fundamental flaws. however, the only material that can withstand those forces that we know of is carbon nanotubes, so this stuff is a long way off.
You seem to have a problem of clumping all of your dissenters into one category. There are many kinds of environmentalists, all of which dislike a certain kind of power generation. For example, in California, we've been trying to build new power plants for ages. Too bad coal/natural gas generate CO2, wind power kills birds, solar panels generate more waste being manufactured than they can ever make back in their lifetime, and nuclear energy is OOOOH SO EVIL. Actually, the only power generation facility I've heard of being built in the past 20 years was SoCal Ed's new parabolic-reflector-stirling-engine solar plant, which I think is the only kind of power all the hippies here can agree on.
I would consider myself an environmentalist, but I am in favor of a.) reducing emissions, and b.) reducing pollution. So coal/gas and solar panels are out. That leaves wind power, nuclear, and stirling engines. A different kind of environmentalist might be for a.) saving wildlife (no wind power), and b.) nuclear disarmnament/60s hippie peace whore... and c.) thinks mirrors are evil cause they channel the devil or something. As you can see, between the two of us, we are out of power generation options. and therefore we can "thank the environmentalists" for their completely unreasonable dedication to some vague concept which is preventing humanity from accessing the power it needs.
um... unless i fell asleep during AP physics, gauss's law describes the gravitational/electrical _flux_ at any point in the sphere. that says nothing for the gravitational acceleration, only that "gravitational flux in" = "gravitational flux out". there's nothing preventing an asteroid from zooming by, knocking a microplanet out of its orbit, and ending the experiment. that being said, orbital perturbations are easy to calculate for given known objects in the area (sun, moon, earth, mir, dr. evil, etc)
also, L4 and L5 are the stable lagrange points, meaning that objects will naturally fall into them. in fact, the jupiter-sun L4 and L5 have clumps of asteroids that just hover there. L1, L2, and L3 are the ones you have to orbit, as the gravitational field at the points are zero, but deviate just slightly and you'll fall away from the point.
"All high-speed Internet providers that I have ever had (Comcast, Yahoo/SBC/AT&T) suffer outages periodically - say, about once every two months for several hours on the average, and this is only the outages that I know about, since I don't use my home computer all the time. Happens at work too - at one time our business DSL was out for two days (thank you "new" AT&T). The electrical power has also been out several times. At the same time I don't remember a single problem with my land line. Note that I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, so this is a relatively high-tech place."
Note that the San Fransisco Bay Area (I'm from San Jose myself) was one of the first markets with a huge demand for broadband. Our infrastructure is TERRIBLE (partially because of the TCI->AT&T->Comcast mess). On the other hand, in areas that didn't have a giant push for broadband immediately, such as Boulder, CO (where i'm going to school), Comcast was able to, given an extra four or five years, completely revamp its infrastructure. We have almost flawless broadband in CO (a relatively low-tech place, at least in some areas), whereas at my parents house in CA, the internet STILL goes down for an hour or so every other day at around 2am.
The population density also makes a difference, too. DSL in the bay area is terrible because you might have 20 houses multiplexed onto a given local loop where in most cities there would be four or five. The cable network is only able to support somewhere around the lines of 38 megabits per cable head-end, and when you have something like five million people in the south bay alone, each one running at six megabits, that's a lot of cable sub-networks.
The problem is, providers are in a constant struggle with eachother. Cable, DSL, and whatever are always in competition. One offers "unlimited" bandwidth for $45 a month, the other has to offer it for 40, etc.
The ISPs then turn around and say "Alright, let's see how much we can gouge out of the other side of our network." And here's where that led us.
If ISPs would stop viewing their network as a cash cow (which it's not -- initial costs to build are covered by high initial subscription rates, which then die down over time and competition, matching the maintainence costs of the network) and move to a real business model, we wouldn't be in this huge "net neutrality" debate.
Yes, on one hand, traffic shaping is a Good Thing. However, leaving the traffic-shaping decisions to the ISPs is a BAD IDEA. How about, instead of banning serverside QoS entirely, you say "ISPs must sell at least some portion of the network as net-neutral, and must CLEARLY STATE how much of it is and isn't" as in, sure, they can allocate 10 mbps to their IPTV/VOIP/special porn delivery, but that is on TOP the of existing unQoSed 6mbps line. Or they can sell "optimized" internet plans for 19.99 a month, where their own services are QoSed higher than vonage's or akimbo's, but they have to have, next to it, a net-neutral internet plan, as well. Joe Sixpack over here, who doesn't care about his choices (or rights and freedoms, incidentally) can buy just what his ISP wants him to (paying less for bandwidth, but probably more for the actual service), while your average slashdot nerd will go "shit, i don't want this crap" and pay for the more expensive, unQoSed version.
When I took APCS, (back in the C++ days...) we were using Codewarrior almost exclusively to compile and run our code. It wasn't required -- more tech-savvy people could just as easily use GCC, but the majority of the class new how to create projects, include and link in the libraries graphically, and press F5 to compile.
And it worked great!...until I had to do some programming for a job. Suddenly, my comfy codewarrior environment was gone, and I had to use GCC and makefiles (and automake.../shudder), and my beloved C++ was starting to look more and more like Greek. With very little background in "manually" compiling my code, it took me forever just to get off the ground.
Basically, I believe that IDEs are nice, once you know the underlying workings of it. The same way that you teach people how to integrate before you give them Mathematica, you should introduce GCC, nano, and makefiles before you give them Anjuta.
the problem with a tiered system is that apple doesn't want to become a web hosting company.
if they offered "free.mac" with certain limitations, who's gonna explain to the new mac user that his site has just been slashdotted and is over his "bandwidth allocation?"
"but i was only using 50 megabytes on the server!" he'll yell, confused.
it's either all or nothing with something like.mac. i'm glad that apple realizes this. and seriously, is $99 bucks a year really that much to pay for what they offer you? it's like changing your oil, you could pay someone 50 bucks to do it for you, and save yourself the trouble of doing it + taking care of the old oil, or you can do it yourself and save some money. apple has given you this choice by not bundling.mac into the price of a new computer.
Unfortunately, "sheer luck" is the best answer you're gonna get for now.
Why did the big bang happen? Well in a timeless universe (remember, time is a dimension created by the big bang) everything that has a nonzero probability of happening happens instantaneously. therefore the big bang, having a nonzero probability of happening (it did, didn't it?), happened.
the same thing applies to evolution. over millions of years, even things that have a very slim chance of happening (non-zero probability), such as organic molecules happening to form into something coherent, happen.
think back a little. the first primordial pools of goo. random organic molecules assembled into amino acids, lipids, etc.
why are these traits still prevalent in life today? not because god decided to put a bunch of different nucleotides together and call it DNA. the protieins hooked together and it happened to survive and easily replicated itsself. a single strand of DNA floating there in the goo, complement proteins stick to the exposed nucleotides, form their own strand, and float away. the process repeats, and you have DNA.
things that replicate easy and survive to replicate tend to win out in the evolutionary war. DNA tends to survive better if it's surrounded by a lipid membrane, so that's what happened. then came the bacteria, then came the multi-celled life. millions of years later you have dinosaurs and cockroaches, plants, humans, etc.
Re:Interesting Issue with DNA as code
on
Writing Genetic Code
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
DNA is "code" because each set of three (or is it four) nucleotides forms a codon. When a strand of DNA is transcribed to RNA, and then processed by an enzyme (transcriptase or something? it's been years since i took bio), protiens with one end that fits with that codon hook up to the RNA strand. the other end of that protien carries an amino acid (the components that form proteins), and so each codon gets "decoded" into an amino acid -- chains of which form proteins.
the information came to be "encoded" because that's probably the best way to pass on protein information. the double-helix of DNA allows it to be error-resistant (think bit flips), and makes it easy to replicate. and the encoding isn't really that complicated, but allows for many combinations from only 4 DNA molecules.
on the article itself, i belive what they're trying to do is put combinations of codons together to create a protein. so far, all we've done is take existing DNA strands that call for certain proteins and mix them around, adding insulin-producing DNA to e-coli, for example.
as for the dangers, i'm less worried about viral strains of mutant human-designed bacteria running around infecting everyone, as much as i'm worried about mutant proteins that we've never seen before. mad cow disease, anyone?
I'm curious what the rat brain was actually controlling. An F-22 is inherently unstable without computer control (normal planes have a tendency to re-equilibrate to level flight, whereas an F-22 has a tendency to fall out of the sky). Was the rat brain subsituting for computer control? or was it just providing direcional input like a normal fighter pilot would?
F-22s can literally fly themselves. Slapping a rat brain on top doesn't exactly make that better.
could really be the start of a feasible way to get off the oil and coal habit...
SoCal Ed's motivation is probably more to get off of the buying-out-of-state-power habit.
But it's gotten to the point where nobody would even give me a recommendation. Normal users aren't going to spend the time to research every linux distro. Not everyone can take a week out of their life to try them all and figure out which one they like best. Worst of all, if you make a bad choice, you're stuck unless you want to uninstall everything and start over. It's not something that i'm (or most people, i'd imagine) are willing to go through.
And no, idealism isn't bad, until it starts to hurt your ability to use a system. I used to spout mac rhetoric like there was no tomorrow, but eventually I realized that my apple propaganda wasn't going to get me connected to my school's 20 different fileservers without a ton of work that I wasn't willing to deal with.
Part of the problem is that there are so many linux distributions that it's daunting. Case in point: The LinuxISOs FAQ says, "Which Distribution Is The Best?
Yeah, right. The best distribution is whichever one that You think is best. I suggest that you install and try as many different distributions as you can."
I consider myself a poweruser, but that statement alone is enough to turn me away from even using linux as my main OS. It's like getting the response "don't use FTP, it's insecure" when asking what FTP server to use on your brand new linux install -- it doesn't answer the question.
Linux people are too idealistic. The second they put pragmatism over idealism is the second they can start getting desktop marketshare.
Slashdot Mirror
If I had mod points, I would mod you down. Not only do you demonstrate a complete disdain for whoever you think is "inferior," you show a complete lack of understanding for the issues in the middle east.
There is no "inferiority complex" in the middle east. They aren't emo kids running around threatening to slit their wrists. It just so happens that their standards of living are ridiculously low compared to the standards of living of "the west," not directly due to us, but partially. If you grew up there, you'd be looking for someone to blame, and their government provides "the great satan" as a convenient scapegoat. Further proving their point, "the great satan's puppet in the region," (aka israel) has just rampaged through lebanon, destroying civilian targets like bridges, hospitals, and airports, further degrading their quality of life. it's lack of understanding of the kind that you have just demonstrated that has brought us into the current situation in iraq and afghanistan, as well as the US unspoken nod to israel to rampage across the middle east.
this in no way relevant to the situations of mac users, who just happen to have a different OS preference. your above statement would be like saying that whenever an african american person acts stereotypically black (whatever you might define that as) they are acting out of a feeling of self-inferiority.
think about it.
Unfortunately, as soon as you leave the atmosphere (which is usually defined to end at 100 km above sea level), the blimps stop working. Geosynchronous orbit lies at 35,000 km above sea level, and the counterweight would have to extend even further.
Not a rocket scientist, but a rocket scientist in training (junior aerospace major at the university of colorado).
Almost all space elevator designs have a counterweight that extends past geosynchronous orbit. This balances the equation (gravity, centripetal acceleration) so that the thing doesn't fall out of the sky. The center of mass isn't exactly at geosynchronous, but the force balances out there, so that's the orbit it stays in. The counterweight has an additional perk in that if you continue up the elevator to the counterweight's altitude, and then let go, you are now flying away from the earth at greater than escape velocity. Free ride to anywhere in (the plane of) the solar system.
To address your second point, the ribbon isn't traveling through the atmosphere. From the point of view of the earth (and the atmosphere), the ribbon is stationary. Not much drag there, unless there's a lot of wind. Also, the atmospheric drag and the weight of an object traveling up the ribbon are inconsequential because the ribbon is under tension. A counterweight at an altitude of 2x geosynchronous (rounding a little) is traveling at about 6 km/s. this requires a centripetal acceleration of 400 km/s^2 to keep it there (remember, it's not in orbit, as gravity isn't the only thing keeping it moving in a circle. the ribbon is pulling on it too). the load applied by the crawler and all the other forces (atmospheric drag, etc) are negligible compared to the tension in the ribbon applied by the counterweight balancing them out.
so no. no fundamental flaws. however, the only material that can withstand those forces that we know of is carbon nanotubes, so this stuff is a long way off.
You seem to have a problem of clumping all of your dissenters into one category. There are many kinds of environmentalists, all of which dislike a certain kind of power generation. For example, in California, we've been trying to build new power plants for ages. Too bad coal/natural gas generate CO2, wind power kills birds, solar panels generate more waste being manufactured than they can ever make back in their lifetime, and nuclear energy is OOOOH SO EVIL. Actually, the only power generation facility I've heard of being built in the past 20 years was SoCal Ed's new parabolic-reflector-stirling-engine solar plant, which I think is the only kind of power all the hippies here can agree on.
I would consider myself an environmentalist, but I am in favor of a.) reducing emissions, and b.) reducing pollution. So coal/gas and solar panels are out. That leaves wind power, nuclear, and stirling engines. A different kind of environmentalist might be for a.) saving wildlife (no wind power), and b.) nuclear disarmnament/60s hippie peace whore... and c.) thinks mirrors are evil cause they channel the devil or something. As you can see, between the two of us, we are out of power generation options. and therefore we can "thank the environmentalists" for their completely unreasonable dedication to some vague concept which is preventing humanity from accessing the power it needs.
um... unless i fell asleep during AP physics, gauss's law describes the gravitational/electrical _flux_ at any point in the sphere. that says nothing for the gravitational acceleration, only that "gravitational flux in" = "gravitational flux out". there's nothing preventing an asteroid from zooming by, knocking a microplanet out of its orbit, and ending the experiment. that being said, orbital perturbations are easy to calculate for given known objects in the area (sun, moon, earth, mir, dr. evil, etc)
also, L4 and L5 are the stable lagrange points, meaning that objects will naturally fall into them. in fact, the jupiter-sun L4 and L5 have clumps of asteroids that just hover there. L1, L2, and L3 are the ones you have to orbit, as the gravitational field at the points are zero, but deviate just slightly and you'll fall away from the point.
"All high-speed Internet providers that I have ever had (Comcast, Yahoo/SBC/AT&T) suffer outages periodically - say, about once every two months for several hours on the average, and this is only the outages that I know about, since I don't use my home computer all the time. Happens at work too - at one time our business DSL was out for two days (thank you "new" AT&T). The electrical power has also been out several times. At the same time I don't remember a single problem with my land line. Note that I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, so this is a relatively high-tech place."
Note that the San Fransisco Bay Area (I'm from San Jose myself) was one of the first markets with a huge demand for broadband. Our infrastructure is TERRIBLE (partially because of the TCI->AT&T->Comcast mess). On the other hand, in areas that didn't have a giant push for broadband immediately, such as Boulder, CO (where i'm going to school), Comcast was able to, given an extra four or five years, completely revamp its infrastructure. We have almost flawless broadband in CO (a relatively low-tech place, at least in some areas), whereas at my parents house in CA, the internet STILL goes down for an hour or so every other day at around 2am.
The population density also makes a difference, too. DSL in the bay area is terrible because you might have 20 houses multiplexed onto a given local loop where in most cities there would be four or five. The cable network is only able to support somewhere around the lines of 38 megabits per cable head-end, and when you have something like five million people in the south bay alone, each one running at six megabits, that's a lot of cable sub-networks.
On the other hand, as a freshman, I bought one iPod and exactly zero beers (frat parties providing alcohol and being underage make that part easy).
The problem is, providers are in a constant struggle with eachother. Cable, DSL, and whatever are always in competition. One offers "unlimited" bandwidth for $45 a month, the other has to offer it for 40, etc.
The ISPs then turn around and say "Alright, let's see how much we can gouge out of the other side of our network." And here's where that led us.
If ISPs would stop viewing their network as a cash cow (which it's not -- initial costs to build are covered by high initial subscription rates, which then die down over time and competition, matching the maintainence costs of the network) and move to a real business model, we wouldn't be in this huge "net neutrality" debate.
Yes, on one hand, traffic shaping is a Good Thing. However, leaving the traffic-shaping decisions to the ISPs is a BAD IDEA. How about, instead of banning serverside QoS entirely, you say "ISPs must sell at least some portion of the network as net-neutral, and must CLEARLY STATE how much of it is and isn't" as in, sure, they can allocate 10 mbps to their IPTV/VOIP/special porn delivery, but that is on TOP the of existing unQoSed 6mbps line. Or they can sell "optimized" internet plans for 19.99 a month, where their own services are QoSed higher than vonage's or akimbo's, but they have to have, next to it, a net-neutral internet plan, as well. Joe Sixpack over here, who doesn't care about his choices (or rights and freedoms, incidentally) can buy just what his ISP wants him to (paying less for bandwidth, but probably more for the actual service), while your average slashdot nerd will go "shit, i don't want this crap" and pay for the more expensive, unQoSed version.
When I took APCS, (back in the C++ days...) we were using Codewarrior almost exclusively to compile and run our code. It wasn't required -- more tech-savvy people could just as easily use GCC, but the majority of the class new how to create projects, include and link in the libraries graphically, and press F5 to compile.
...until I had to do some programming for a job. Suddenly, my comfy codewarrior environment was gone, and I had to use GCC and makefiles (and automake... /shudder), and my beloved C++ was starting to look more and more like Greek. With very little background in "manually" compiling my code, it took me forever just to get off the ground.
And it worked great!
Basically, I believe that IDEs are nice, once you know the underlying workings of it. The same way that you teach people how to integrate before you give them Mathematica, you should introduce GCC, nano, and makefiles before you give them Anjuta.
Nah, only Georgia. The northern states were religious activitst.
Says alot about us, no?
the problem with a tiered system is that apple doesn't want to become a web hosting company.
.mac" with certain limitations, who's gonna explain to the new mac user that his site has just been slashdotted and is over his "bandwidth allocation?"
.mac. i'm glad that apple realizes this. and seriously, is $99 bucks a year really that much to pay for what they offer you? it's like changing your oil, you could pay someone 50 bucks to do it for you, and save yourself the trouble of doing it + taking care of the old oil, or you can do it yourself and save some money. apple has given you this choice by not bundling .mac into the price of a new computer.
if they offered "free
"but i was only using 50 megabytes on the server!" he'll yell, confused.
it's either all or nothing with something like
Finally! We'll be able to see whether electrons are indeed yellow or not!
Unfortunately, "sheer luck" is the best answer you're gonna get for now.
Why did the big bang happen? Well in a timeless universe (remember, time is a dimension created by the big bang) everything that has a nonzero probability of happening happens instantaneously. therefore the big bang, having a nonzero probability of happening (it did, didn't it?), happened.
the same thing applies to evolution. over millions of years, even things that have a very slim chance of happening (non-zero probability), such as organic molecules happening to form into something coherent, happen.
think back a little. the first primordial pools of goo. random organic molecules assembled into amino acids, lipids, etc.
why are these traits still prevalent in life today? not because god decided to put a bunch of different nucleotides together and call it DNA. the protieins hooked together and it happened to survive and easily replicated itsself. a single strand of DNA floating there in the goo, complement proteins stick to the exposed nucleotides, form their own strand, and float away. the process repeats, and you have DNA.
things that replicate easy and survive to replicate tend to win out in the evolutionary war. DNA tends to survive better if it's surrounded by a lipid membrane, so that's what happened. then came the bacteria, then came the multi-celled life. millions of years later you have dinosaurs and cockroaches, plants, humans, etc.
DNA is "code" because each set of three (or is it four) nucleotides forms a codon. When a strand of DNA is transcribed to RNA, and then processed by an enzyme (transcriptase or something? it's been years since i took bio), protiens with one end that fits with that codon hook up to the RNA strand. the other end of that protien carries an amino acid (the components that form proteins), and so each codon gets "decoded" into an amino acid -- chains of which form proteins.
the information came to be "encoded" because that's probably the best way to pass on protein information. the double-helix of DNA allows it to be error-resistant (think bit flips), and makes it easy to replicate. and the encoding isn't really that complicated, but allows for many combinations from only 4 DNA molecules.
on the article itself, i belive what they're trying to do is put combinations of codons together to create a protein. so far, all we've done is take existing DNA strands that call for certain proteins and mix them around, adding insulin-producing DNA to e-coli, for example.
as for the dangers, i'm less worried about viral strains of mutant human-designed bacteria running around infecting everyone, as much as i'm worried about mutant proteins that we've never seen before. mad cow disease, anyone?
I'm curious what the rat brain was actually controlling. An F-22 is inherently unstable without computer control (normal planes have a tendency to re-equilibrate to level flight, whereas an F-22 has a tendency to fall out of the sky). Was the rat brain subsituting for computer control? or was it just providing direcional input like a normal fighter pilot would? F-22s can literally fly themselves. Slapping a rat brain on top doesn't exactly make that better.
could really be the start of a feasible way to get off the oil and coal habit... SoCal Ed's motivation is probably more to get off of the buying-out-of-state-power habit.
But it's gotten to the point where nobody would even give me a recommendation. Normal users aren't going to spend the time to research every linux distro. Not everyone can take a week out of their life to try them all and figure out which one they like best. Worst of all, if you make a bad choice, you're stuck unless you want to uninstall everything and start over. It's not something that i'm (or most people, i'd imagine) are willing to go through. And no, idealism isn't bad, until it starts to hurt your ability to use a system. I used to spout mac rhetoric like there was no tomorrow, but eventually I realized that my apple propaganda wasn't going to get me connected to my school's 20 different fileservers without a ton of work that I wasn't willing to deal with.
Part of the problem is that there are so many linux distributions that it's daunting. Case in point: The LinuxISOs FAQ says,
"Which Distribution Is The Best?
Yeah, right. The best distribution is whichever one that You think is best. I suggest that you install and try as many different distributions as you can."
I consider myself a poweruser, but that statement alone is enough to turn me away from even using linux as my main OS. It's like getting the response "don't use FTP, it's insecure" when asking what FTP server to use on your brand new linux install -- it doesn't answer the question.
Linux people are too idealistic. The second they put pragmatism over idealism is the second they can start getting desktop marketshare.