I suggest mounting a standard generator at the core of the prospective space ship and attaching a coffin containing one of our founding fathers to it. The rapid spinning should provide plentiful power for all manner of techno-gadgetry.
1. Vote for someone 2. Vote AGAINST someone or 3. Vote my conscience.
#1 and #2 would involve votes for people I didn't really agree with but either of which had a realistic chance of winning. Once I had worked this out, I realized that I was being suckered into the classic popularity contest. Not the one where "I'm popular", but the one where "I successfully picked the WINNER!".
That was crap.
So I went back to the ballot to find someone that I agreed with... and came up semi-blank. The solution, it was clear, was going to be more complicated that I had thought.
I began working my way through the party descriptions again, looking for something I might have missed. Then I compared the track records of the elected officials that identify w/ each party and worked out a rough graph with two axis to determine how well each candidate had met the stated goals of their party. I thought of it as a 'Truth in Advertising' metric. How often do candidates of party X meet their promises? Once I had that, I aggregated the data and set it aside.
I then wrote down my core beliefs and popped them into Excel alongside the data for the 'TiA' metric and generated a quick 3D histogram to find which political parties were closest both in belief to my own and high in followthrough (the TiA number). Finally, I had my spreadsheet take this graph and do a pivot on the results and generate the party answer.
Unfortunately, my grasp of Excel is presumably sub-par, so the answer field populated with some sort of complicated error. I tried debugging it, but I didn't know how to modify VBS, and then when I _could_ get to it, I couldn't figure out how to set tracepoints. I tried to bypass the error by initializing a pointer that I could push and pop to in a handy little block of assembly, but I couldn't quite seem to figure out how to use pointers in VBS, so eventually I just voted the Libertarian party.
I've had the same problem, but I determined quickly that it wasn't actually the COM that was picking up the interference, it was the intercom. When I activate the Pilot Isolate function on my intercom, I no longer hear interference from my phone. It's a useful tool when flying a challenging approach or working Class B airspace or other com heavy flight.
A suggestion to other pilots, as an experiment, try your pilot isolate function to see if the interference continues. It's not a cure-all, but if it works, it's a useful tool for the right times. Heck, I now fly w/ pilot iso enabled all the time when I'm flying solo, except for when I want to hear my own voice as accompaniment while singing off-pitch melodies or beatboxes to myself over the middle of nowhere.
The FAA has an advisory on PEDs (personal electronics devices) called AC 91.21.1b where they suggest that carriers set their own standards as to what PEDs are allowed and which are not. This applies to US planes only, but I mention it as a point of comparison.
Whenever you read incidents of PEDs interfering with aircraft, it's important to note that they're pretty much all anecdotal. There's a story from 15 years ago where a pilot claimed that a laptop being turned on and off would toggle the autopilot disconnect, for instance, but when the airline purchased that exact laptop from the passenger and tried reproducing it on the same route at the same location and altitude, they were unable.
Modern avionics are not very susceptible to interference like this. Qantas may have chosen this explanation at this point for the same reason that a software developer might claim 'alpha bit decay' (or cosmic rays) was responsible for an unreproducible software crash. No confirmation is guaranteed, and a negative result during a test doesn't prove that the theory is wrong.
For my background, I've developed software, built programmable electronics, and installed avionics in aircraft. I don't claim to be an expert, but I've got a 'Bravo Sierra' alarm that's going off when I read this story.
Is this a legit question being asked at the end of the story? Or is this whole article a thinly veiled attempt to editorialize about an event the author disagrees with in an effort to drum up community support for his/her project?
It seems like Slashdot is being used as a hammer here, instead of just the normal server-blasting time waster we all signed up for. I don't like being used.
What's the deliverable for things like the 'Broadband data improvement act'? Nothing, as far as I can tell, except some congressional reports about which areas of the country have high speed internet access. This is data that should be collected by the companies looking to know where to invest. That's how commerce works.
This isn't $40 million out of the ether, it's YOUR money (if you're a US taxpayer, anyhow).
What in blue blazes are we doing? The economic crisis we're in is multi-faceted, and mad crazy spending is a big component, both privately AND governmentally.
Obviously child-porn websites can't exist without protocol standards that designate how things like HTTP and HTML are to work.
The police who created this list were simply cutting off the head of the beast. Sure, there might be a little collateral damage... but won't somebody think of the children?
Anyhow, mission accomplished. You might even say it has been finnished.
There's about 20 "I don't see it in Google Maps" and "It was photoshopped!" posts that don't mention any of the basic reasons why this didn't work.
1. Google Maps isn't realtime, some areas have photos updated every few years. My house is a picture from over a year ago, for instance. Just because the bird goes overhead doesn't mean the content goes into Google Maps, and even if it did, it would only go in for a few days until the next pass, so... concept fail.
2. Did anyone actually LOOK at the photos taken on the ground at the event? It was OVERCAST. These are not magical Star Trek satellites with super inverse polaron field vision that sees through clouds.
Why aren't other folks touching on these VERY BASIC FLAWS with the clever premise?
This should be all anyone needs to know to !vote on the issue. There is no 'special pass' for things that have been on Slashdot, or are about Wikipedia.
All the coverage of this cowardly act seems to really implicitly glamorize suicide. When people kill themselves, they hurt families, loved ones, etc. Then there's all this fawning news coverage of the suicide... oh come on.
He took the cowards way out. No diagnosis of terminal cancer, his death doesn't somehow cleverly result in saving someone from some terrible fate, there's no apparent real reason for doing it other than just giving up.
Fine, your life is the only real currency you have any anyone should be entitled to make that one decision about when and where they go. But for the news to make such a big deal out of it is a disservice to all the writers whos passing went unannounced and sends a terribly mixed message to society about how we value folks more for their death than their life.
China is fast tracking their progress in space, and they're doing pretty good risk management to get it done. They used Russian experience when designing their capsule system (their spacecraft has a number of big similarities to the Soyuz capsule, very very big similarities, and now they're taking up a backup suit in case a design flaw appears during the test that would affect a rescuer. It's a fine idea and doesn't indicate some big uncertainty about their own design, it shows a clear headed decision to trade a possible nationalistic PR win for a measured, risk aware backup plan that puts the lives of their Taikonauts ahead of the usual spin goals.
I'm not a huge fan of PRC in general, but their space program has been well executed so far. They're making good use of available data while still innovating on their terms instead of having to build everything from scratch.
This is perfectly reasonable if they're up front about it. I have a request... I would like a method to see what my consumption so far is so I can plan appropriately.
Alright everyone, today's team building exercise will be to complete this discussion without mentioning Nicolai Tesla! Everyone, let's get together on this and try to avoid mentioning him in this thread and keep it entirely Tesla free!...oh goddamnit.
Folks, folks, the REAL news here is that the word iPhone doesn't appear in the article. We've reached a point where a phone w/ new technology (Android, in this case) can be mentioned without the comparison being made. I don't know if it was an oversight by the author, or if iPhones have passed the hype-cusp or what, but this is a big day for cell phone news.
I loves my iPhone, btw, but I'm not a fanboi that thinks that it has an inherent greatness because of its origins. The most exciting thing to me about the iPhone is the effect it's having on the rest of the industry. Competition makes things better, and if future phones make serious inroads to usability of the caliber the iPhone did, then we're in for some great stuff.
The challenge for Android seems to be making it compelling for the user. The news I've read and documents I've reviewed suggest that the emphasis is on the developers, making it powerful to code on and providing a heavy duty framework. The UI demos I've seen so far have left me cold, though, and remind me more of Windows Mobile.
Anyhow, I digress. No mention of iPhone: Good. Not because I hate the iPhone (I loves it), but because I think the focus should be on the user, not on one specific device.
You appear to misunderstand: 1. How much power is needed to apply an appropriate vector to the Significant (capital S is appropriate) mass. 2. The method used to propagate the blast energy into the asteroid.
The first item depends on the size of the asteroid, but the killers are usually pretty big, and need a big push. The amount of push depends on where in the orbit you find it, of course.
The second item is basically this: You can't rely on the atmosphere to transmit a 'shockwave' to the asteroid. In a vacuum, the actual shockwave is negligible once you get too far away (inverse square) and even up close, is only comprised of the limited mass of the bomb. Again, negligible effect. The actual propulsion comes from mass ejected by the asteroid itself. What would compel said mass to depart fast enough to create a thrust vector? Why, how about the sudden massive heating of one side? With a hydrogen bomb, you get the energy needed. For devices in the 15-20KT range, you're talking atomics, and the amount of usable energy that can be imparted is reduced significantly.
So the job of the bomb is not so much to "blow the asteroid off course", it is to convert the asteroid into a rock-rocket that fires molten asteroilava in one direction to create a vector for the larger mass in another.
Nukes have been a popular options because: 1. We have them. 2. They have a high ISP (a measure of efficiency) when used as propulsion against a large object. Paradoxically, the ISP for Orion-style nuke propulsion increases with the size/mass of the object. 3. They're much more portable compared to most other types of methods.
Schweikart has identified the REALLY valuable truth, that we need to improve our detection method. We also need to develop deep space capability because the further out we can intercept them, the less energy is needed to perform the deflection. Lower energy can also mean less danger of fracturing the mass.
The writing in the description is poorly constructed. When someone reads "It's an evolutionary release for the Norwegian software company, but it comes just days after Apple's iPhone 3G, with its highly capable Safari browser, went on sale" they would reasonably assume that in the context of the article, this "Browser War" has suddenly sprung up, and that all of the opening shots are being fired right now.
Of course, the "highly capable" Safari browser has been out for a year on the pre-3G iPhones too, a distinction that the text confuses terribly.
The 'browser war' has been mobile since the first day God crapped out a WAP-enabled cell phone, and just as humans went from sticks and rocks to atomic weapons, the years of mobile browsing 'warfare' has progressed to a point where the phones are almost within eyeshot of being as capable as the desktop machines.
To declare this a 'new war' is disingenuous at best, and manipulative of page hits for the purpose of generating advertising revenue at worst.
At Symantec, I used to use these tools to help plan tests. I wrote a simple code velocity tool that monitored Perforce checkins and generated code velocity graphs and alerts in different components as time passed. With it, QA could easily see which code was being touched the most and dig down to the specific changelists and see what was going on. It really helped keep good visibility on what needed the most attention and helped everyone avoid being 'surprised' by someone dropping a bunch of changes into an area that wasn't watched carefully. During the final days of development before our products escaped to manufacturing, this provided vital insight into what was happening.
I've since moved on, and I think the tool has since gone offline, but I think there's a real value to doing static analysis as part of the planning for everything else.
One thing remains constant in thousands of years of recovered cave paintings, manuscripts, papyrus drawings, and more. And that constant... is pornography. It lasts, it's popular, and it's always in demand.
Clearly, the answer for long term data storage is to use steganographic techniques to encode your data into various types of creative skinpics. Pick famous folks, pretty folks, strange fetishes... the whole gamut. Pick things that people will keep. A hundred years later, all someone needs is the key phrases to search for. "We need that Higgs Boson experiment data from 2012, how will we get it? The infocalypse has destroyed all of our cataloged data!" "No problem, my great grandfather left a note in his journal telling his descendants to search for 'Britney spears enema' and use 'wet riffs' to decode the LHC data in whatever we use for files." "President Spears? That's crazy!"
Slashdot Mirror
When marriage is made illegal, only outlaws will have inlaws.
It's an LED with an anticipated life of 20,000 hours. That's, like, a war-crime's amount of PowerPoint.
Can 'War Crime' be a unit of measurement for terribleness and quantity?
I suggest mounting a standard generator at the core of the prospective space ship and attaching a coffin containing one of our founding fathers to it. The rapid spinning should provide plentiful power for all manner of techno-gadgetry.
I saw three choices this year. I could:
1. Vote for someone
2. Vote AGAINST someone
or
3. Vote my conscience.
#1 and #2 would involve votes for people I didn't really agree with but either of which had a realistic chance of winning. Once I had worked this out, I realized that I was being suckered into the classic popularity contest. Not the one where "I'm popular", but the one where "I successfully picked the WINNER!".
That was crap.
So I went back to the ballot to find someone that I agreed with... and came up semi-blank. The solution, it was clear, was going to be more complicated that I had thought.
I began working my way through the party descriptions again, looking for something I might have missed. Then I compared the track records of the elected officials that identify w/ each party and worked out a rough graph with two axis to determine how well each candidate had met the stated goals of their party. I thought of it as a 'Truth in Advertising' metric. How often do candidates of party X meet their promises? Once I had that, I aggregated the data and set it aside.
I then wrote down my core beliefs and popped them into Excel alongside the data for the 'TiA' metric and generated a quick 3D histogram to find which political parties were closest both in belief to my own and high in followthrough (the TiA number). Finally, I had my spreadsheet take this graph and do a pivot on the results and generate the party answer.
Unfortunately, my grasp of Excel is presumably sub-par, so the answer field populated with some sort of complicated error. I tried debugging it, but I didn't know how to modify VBS, and then when I _could_ get to it, I couldn't figure out how to set tracepoints. I tried to bypass the error by initializing a pointer that I could push and pop to in a handy little block of assembly, but I couldn't quite seem to figure out how to use pointers in VBS, so eventually I just voted the Libertarian party.
I've had the same problem, but I determined quickly that it wasn't actually the COM that was picking up the interference, it was the intercom. When I activate the Pilot Isolate function on my intercom, I no longer hear interference from my phone. It's a useful tool when flying a challenging approach or working Class B airspace or other com heavy flight.
A suggestion to other pilots, as an experiment, try your pilot isolate function to see if the interference continues. It's not a cure-all, but if it works, it's a useful tool for the right times. Heck, I now fly w/ pilot iso enabled all the time when I'm flying solo, except for when I want to hear my own voice as accompaniment while singing off-pitch melodies or beatboxes to myself over the middle of nowhere.
The FAA has an advisory on PEDs (personal electronics devices) called AC 91.21.1b where they suggest that carriers set their own standards as to what PEDs are allowed and which are not. This applies to US planes only, but I mention it as a point of comparison.
Whenever you read incidents of PEDs interfering with aircraft, it's important to note that they're pretty much all anecdotal. There's a story from 15 years ago where a pilot claimed that a laptop being turned on and off would toggle the autopilot disconnect, for instance, but when the airline purchased that exact laptop from the passenger and tried reproducing it on the same route at the same location and altitude, they were unable.
Modern avionics are not very susceptible to interference like this. Qantas may have chosen this explanation at this point for the same reason that a software developer might claim 'alpha bit decay' (or cosmic rays) was responsible for an unreproducible software crash. No confirmation is guaranteed, and a negative result during a test doesn't prove that the theory is wrong.
For my background, I've developed software, built programmable electronics, and installed avionics in aircraft. I don't claim to be an expert, but I've got a 'Bravo Sierra' alarm that's going off when I read this story.
Is this a legit question being asked at the end of the story? Or is this whole article a thinly veiled attempt to editorialize about an event the author disagrees with in an effort to drum up community support for his/her project?
It seems like Slashdot is being used as a hammer here, instead of just the normal server-blasting time waster we all signed up for. I don't like being used.
What's the deliverable for things like the 'Broadband data improvement act'? Nothing, as far as I can tell, except some congressional reports about which areas of the country have high speed internet access. This is data that should be collected by the companies looking to know where to invest. That's how commerce works.
The cost? $40 million a YEAR. http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/85xx/doc8587/s1492.pdf
This isn't $40 million out of the ether, it's YOUR money (if you're a US taxpayer, anyhow).
What in blue blazes are we doing? The economic crisis we're in is multi-faceted, and mad crazy spending is a big component, both privately AND governmentally.
Obviously child-porn websites can't exist without protocol standards that designate how things like HTTP and HTML are to work.
The police who created this list were simply cutting off the head of the beast. Sure, there might be a little collateral damage... but won't somebody think of the children?
Anyhow, mission accomplished. You might even say it has been finnished.
There's about 20 "I don't see it in Google Maps" and "It was photoshopped!" posts that don't mention any of the basic reasons why this didn't work.
1. Google Maps isn't realtime, some areas have photos updated every few years. My house is a picture from over a year ago, for instance. Just because the bird goes overhead doesn't mean the content goes into Google Maps, and even if it did, it would only go in for a few days until the next pass, so... concept fail.
2. Did anyone actually LOOK at the photos taken on the ground at the event? It was OVERCAST. These are not magical Star Trek satellites with super inverse polaron field vision that sees through clouds.
Why aren't other folks touching on these VERY BASIC FLAWS with the clever premise?
Is the website notable? Has the mainstream media reported on it? Does it meet the requirements listed in WP:WEB, the guideline for website notability?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability_(web)
This should be all anyone needs to know to !vote on the issue. There is no 'special pass' for things that have been on Slashdot, or are about Wikipedia.
All the coverage of this cowardly act seems to really implicitly glamorize suicide. When people kill themselves, they hurt families, loved ones, etc. Then there's all this fawning news coverage of the suicide... oh come on.
He took the cowards way out. No diagnosis of terminal cancer, his death doesn't somehow cleverly result in saving someone from some terrible fate, there's no apparent real reason for doing it other than just giving up.
Fine, your life is the only real currency you have any anyone should be entitled to make that one decision about when and where they go. But for the news to make such a big deal out of it is a disservice to all the writers whos passing went unannounced and sends a terribly mixed message to society about how we value folks more for their death than their life.
China is fast tracking their progress in space, and they're doing pretty good risk management to get it done. They used Russian experience when designing their capsule system (their spacecraft has a number of big similarities to the Soyuz capsule, very very big similarities, and now they're taking up a backup suit in case a design flaw appears during the test that would affect a rescuer. It's a fine idea and doesn't indicate some big uncertainty about their own design, it shows a clear headed decision to trade a possible nationalistic PR win for a measured, risk aware backup plan that puts the lives of their Taikonauts ahead of the usual spin goals.
I'm not a huge fan of PRC in general, but their space program has been well executed so far. They're making good use of available data while still innovating on their terms instead of having to build everything from scratch.
I assume they used Hobonic detectors.
This is perfectly reasonable if they're up front about it. I have a request... I would like a method to see what my consumption so far is so I can plan appropriately.
Alright everyone, today's team building exercise will be to complete this discussion without mentioning Nicolai Tesla! Everyone, let's get together on this and try to avoid mentioning him in this thread and keep it entirely Tesla free! ...oh goddamnit.
Ethanol based fuel cells would seem to be perfect for this equipment, based on some professional photographers I've met in the past.
"One for you," pours vodka into the camera. "And one for me," while pouring some vodka into self. Rinse, repeat.
Folks, folks, the REAL news here is that the word iPhone doesn't appear in the article. We've reached a point where a phone w/ new technology (Android, in this case) can be mentioned without the comparison being made. I don't know if it was an oversight by the author, or if iPhones have passed the hype-cusp or what, but this is a big day for cell phone news.
I loves my iPhone, btw, but I'm not a fanboi that thinks that it has an inherent greatness because of its origins. The most exciting thing to me about the iPhone is the effect it's having on the rest of the industry. Competition makes things better, and if future phones make serious inroads to usability of the caliber the iPhone did, then we're in for some great stuff.
The challenge for Android seems to be making it compelling for the user. The news I've read and documents I've reviewed suggest that the emphasis is on the developers, making it powerful to code on and providing a heavy duty framework. The UI demos I've seen so far have left me cold, though, and remind me more of Windows Mobile.
Anyhow, I digress. No mention of iPhone: Good. Not because I hate the iPhone (I loves it), but because I think the focus should be on the user, not on one specific device.
1. Buy all the Krylon 'Chrome' spray paint.
2. Relabel it and sell it to the government as 'Anti-Laser Shielding'.
3. Profit!
Ha ha h- wait... there's a step #2. There's never a step #2. wtf
You appear to misunderstand:
1. How much power is needed to apply an appropriate vector to the Significant (capital S is appropriate) mass.
2. The method used to propagate the blast energy into the asteroid.
The first item depends on the size of the asteroid, but the killers are usually pretty big, and need a big push. The amount of push depends on where in the orbit you find it, of course.
The second item is basically this: You can't rely on the atmosphere to transmit a 'shockwave' to the asteroid. In a vacuum, the actual shockwave is negligible once you get too far away (inverse square) and even up close, is only comprised of the limited mass of the bomb. Again, negligible effect. The actual propulsion comes from mass ejected by the asteroid itself. What would compel said mass to depart fast enough to create a thrust vector? Why, how about the sudden massive heating of one side? With a hydrogen bomb, you get the energy needed. For devices in the 15-20KT range, you're talking atomics, and the amount of usable energy that can be imparted is reduced significantly.
So the job of the bomb is not so much to "blow the asteroid off course", it is to convert the asteroid into a rock-rocket that fires molten asteroilava in one direction to create a vector for the larger mass in another.
Nukes have been a popular options because:
1. We have them.
2. They have a high ISP (a measure of efficiency) when used as propulsion against a large object. Paradoxically, the ISP for Orion-style nuke propulsion increases with the size/mass of the object.
3. They're much more portable compared to most other types of methods.
Schweikart has identified the REALLY valuable truth, that we need to improve our detection method. We also need to develop deep space capability because the further out we can intercept them, the less energy is needed to perform the deflection. Lower energy can also mean less danger of fracturing the mass.
The writing in the description is poorly constructed. When someone reads "It's an evolutionary release for the Norwegian software company, but it comes just days after Apple's iPhone 3G, with its highly capable Safari browser, went on sale" they would reasonably assume that in the context of the article, this "Browser War" has suddenly sprung up, and that all of the opening shots are being fired right now.
Of course, the "highly capable" Safari browser has been out for a year on the pre-3G iPhones too, a distinction that the text confuses terribly.
The 'browser war' has been mobile since the first day God crapped out a WAP-enabled cell phone, and just as humans went from sticks and rocks to atomic weapons, the years of mobile browsing 'warfare' has progressed to a point where the phones are almost within eyeshot of being as capable as the desktop machines.
To declare this a 'new war' is disingenuous at best, and manipulative of page hits for the purpose of generating advertising revenue at worst.
> Is Google Making Us Stupid?
I can't answer your question, my internet connection was down all morning.
At Symantec, I used to use these tools to help plan tests. I wrote a simple code velocity tool that monitored Perforce checkins and generated code velocity graphs and alerts in different components as time passed. With it, QA could easily see which code was being touched the most and dig down to the specific changelists and see what was going on. It really helped keep good visibility on what needed the most attention and helped everyone avoid being 'surprised' by someone dropping a bunch of changes into an area that wasn't watched carefully. During the final days of development before our products escaped to manufacturing, this provided vital insight into what was happening.
I've since moved on, and I think the tool has since gone offline, but I think there's a real value to doing static analysis as part of the planning for everything else.
One thing remains constant in thousands of years of recovered cave paintings, manuscripts, papyrus drawings, and more. And that constant... is pornography. It lasts, it's popular, and it's always in demand.
Clearly, the answer for long term data storage is to use steganographic techniques to encode your data into various types of creative skinpics. Pick famous folks, pretty folks, strange fetishes... the whole gamut. Pick things that people will keep. A hundred years later, all someone needs is the key phrases to search for.
"We need that Higgs Boson experiment data from 2012, how will we get it? The infocalypse has destroyed all of our cataloged data!"
"No problem, my great grandfather left a note in his journal telling his descendants to search for 'Britney spears enema' and use 'wet riffs' to decode the LHC data in whatever we use for files."
"President Spears? That's crazy!"
Voila!