Yes, it'll be great for many things, but the Cell is not IEEE compliant in its 32-bit arithmetic, so algorithms that depend on denormalized numbers or infinities matching the spec will break. This actually matters for a graphics approach that would otherwise be attractive for the Cell, conformal geometric algebra, where plane primitives are infinite spheres and line primitives are infinite circles.
IANAL but I believe that in British libel law the defendant must prove that the derogatory information was likely true, whereas in America the plaintiff must prove that the information was definitely not true and was made with reckless or knowing disregard for the facts. The British reporters just have way more balls than the Americans.
How did the BJS change the methods of measuring the incidence of rape? What was being reported before, and what now? What were the changes in the conviction percentages, sentencing and parole policies during that time that would affect rape incarceration rates? It sounds like you are blowing smoke to cover up the fact that porn availability and rape are inversely correlated.
OK... you are a flaming nut. Genesis is a myth. If you believe it is literally true, you are wrong/i>. If you belive the Bible, Old Testament or New is not self- contradictory on both a literal and figurative level, you have not been thinking. If you think that theology is in any way a source of truth, you are deluded, and when you attempt to compare the Bible with quantum mechanics, you expose yourself as a fool.
Your religion deserves no respect, it is utterly and comletely false. The perversion of your mind by this hateful and puerile dogma is more wretched than any possible pornography.
Not all - below the equivalent of a modern $3000 - $5000/yr per capita a country's life expectancy drops like a rock, whether now or 150 years ago. Above that amount makes almost no difference in life expectancy. Yet even in antiquity, above a certain wealth, modest by today's standards, anyone who made it to the age of seven and didn't birth children or engage in battle had a good chance of living to seventy or more.
There is relative poverty, but there is also absolute povery, where one cannot obtain food, protection from the elements, hygene, or basic medicine. The former hurts, but the latter tortures and kills.
Fair use can be justified under the "to promote the progress of...arts" clause since fair use does not compete with or reduce the value of the original work in the marketplace, whereas in the "contractors get patents free for secret-stuff" case the incentive is in the direction of impeding the progress of the useful arts because it makes a useful application secret and it leads inventors to not bother disclosing stuff the government will just steal wholesale anyway.
Diesel and gasoline have very similar volumetric energy densities. Vegetable oil should be in the same ballpark, too. Liquid hydrocarbons are all pretty similar. I suspect that he is counting only the diesel in the fuel milage and not the oil, though, or else it's just some pumpkinseed-aerodynamic, near-motorcycle weight vehicle.
It was about cheap puppets making sarcastic comments about bad movies, thus selling ad time for movies that ordinarily would have required the Clockwork Orange conditioning chair to get people to watch. Calling them robots had nothing to do with the show's brilliant idea of flogging crap by making fun of old crap.
Absolutely - but who in their wrong mind could rank The Outer Limits # 13, behind even such garbage as Xena and Flash Gordon? TOL was almost the only real SF on the whole list besides the Twilight Zone! Space operas and open-ended "series" are ALL crap if you plug in your frontal lobes. Mere entertainment, sometimes with belabored pretentions to serious thought - but that's all.
Mercury wouldn't qualify under that definition unless you take atmosphere to mean thinner than many vacuum chambers on Earth. Many other posters have requited orbit around a star, which seems unjustified - you have the right idea in distinguishing a planet from a moon by whether it orbits another non-stellar object. Wandering planets should still be called planets. But I also think that two planets of similar size orbiting one another should both be planets - a reasonable rule would be if neither one is at least twice the mass of the other, then they're both planets. The spherical requrement is wrong since a spinning object will be an oblate spheroid; most or all planets including Earth are oblate to some extent. Futher, an iron planet formed by collision after a large impact could be very non-spherical and asymmetrical if it had already cooled before the impact. In order to have a definite, objective test that is as simple as possible, size should be the only criterion for calling an object not orbiting another planet a planet. The size requirement should be expansive enough to cover all the traditional planets, with the possible exception of Pluto. In borderline cases, and to be clear, the size should be expressed as volume, or equivalently in terms of diameter of a sphere of that volume. To make the notion of volume more precise and observable, some test for what counts as volume should be given, such as "absorbing or reflecting more than x% of visible light" or "having a density of at least 0.y g/cc".
If we want to choose a round number for the radius and/or keep Pluto as a planet: 0.419E10 km^3 - 1000km radius
Pluto 0.715E10 km^3- 1190km radius
If we want to choose a very round number for the volume and/or stop calling Pluto a planet: 1E10 km^3 - 1337km radius,
But when your own militia is in Iraq, and the President makes you ship in some soldiers from Texas and tells them your neighbors are looters and insurgents...
The Roman fasces (root of the word fascist) consists of an axe within a bundle of rods, bound by a red strap. As a symbol of state power, the rods were for beating prisoners, the axe for decapitating them.
This emblem on Mussolini's flag of office, the symbol of his Partito Nazionale Fascista, and the the present Guardia Civil (Franco's jackbooted thugs) can also be found on the the 1916-1945 US dimes, the Lincoln memorial chair; all over the US Capitol, including multiple copies on the Speaker's rostrum, the National Guard insignia, etc, etc,
Article I Section 8: "The Congress shall have Power....To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries"
It does not say that Congress has the power to exempt the government from respecting the exclusive rights they have already secured for the inventor - otherwise it would mean the right was not in fact exclusive. Still less does it say that the government can exempt some corporation of which it is a customer from respecting the inventor's rights. By saying that the inventor cannot sue the private firm infringing the patent or or present facts mateeial to suc a suit, the patent has in fact been taken, since a patent is nothing but a right to buing suit in order to prevent unlicensed use. If the information needed to make the case is a governmental secret, then the least prejudicial remedy is to close that part of the hearing to the public and seal that portion of the record.
Even if the government believes it needs some patented invention for national security, it has no constitutional right to use it without the consent of the holder of the patent rights unless the government can demonstrate that it cannot effectively excercise its right to provide for the common defense without the use of the invention. Defense is not synonymous with military or intelligence use. The government should bear the burden of proof that the proposed use was indispensible in preventing or repelling a reasonably forseeable actual attack, and even then must provide just compesation for that use.
Are you claiming that HR knows how to do their job better than people who understand an actual subject - ANY subject? Or that financial advisors are somehow not giant weasels who could be replaced by a very small shell script with better results?
K. Eric Drexler, (primary originator of molecular nanotechnology) first came up with the idea that the protein folding problem did not have to be solved in order to design and produce proteins of specified shapes and functions:
From
http://www.imm.org/PNAS.html: Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA Vol. 78, No. 9, pp. 5275-5278, September 1981 Chemistry section Molecular engineering: An approach to the development of general capabilities for molecular manipulation
K. Eric Drexler Space Systems Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139
Communicated by Arthur Kantrowitz, June 4, 1981.... What can be built with these tools? Gene synthesis (3) and recombinant DNA technology can direct the ribosomal machinery of bacteria to produce novel proteins, which can serve as components of larger molecular structures....
natural scientists seek a more general understanding than design engineers require. Science seeks the ability to predict the conformations of all natural polypeptides. In attempting this, protein chemists can search for a minimum-energy chain conformation (in hope that the protein assumes not a local but a global minimum-energy conformation) (6) or can attempt to follow the chain-folding mechanism to find the final conformation (7). Prediction will be easier if the natural conformation has outstanding stability or if its folding mechanism proceeds in a sequence of strongly preferred steps....
Engineers (in contrast to scientists) need not seek to understand all proteins but only enough to produce useful systems in a reasonable number of attempts.... Through use of strategically placed charged groups, polar groups, disulfide bonds, hydrogen bonds, and hydrophobic groups, the engineer should be able to design proteins that not only fold predictably to a stable structure (sometimes) but that serve a planned function as well.
***
PROTEIN ENGINEERING: A 1988 view of some 1981 predictions K. Eric Drexler Visiting Scholar, Stanford University. Box 60775, Palo Alto, CA 94306
A 1981 paper [1] discussed de novo protein design as part of a long-term strategy for developing complex molecular devices and systems. It presented arguments against the view that the fold-design problem is an extension of the classical (and still unsolved) fold-prediction problem (i.e., predicting folds from sequences without homologous models), a view which has discouraged efforts at design.
Fold prediction is a scientific problem: it must deal with naturally evolved sequences, but natural selection's 'design goals' enforce only the physical reliability of folding -- not its human predictability. This results in folds of only minimal stability. Fold design, in contrast, is an engineering problem. Protein engineers, exploiting their freedom of design, can work with sequences artificially selected for superior predictability and stability of folding. These observations indicated that "the difficulties encountered in predicting the conformations of natural proteins do not seem insurmountable obstacles to protein engineering" [1].
In accord with the implications of this argument, we have seen the successful, de novo design of a globular protein (alpha-4) [2,3] while the classical fold prediction problem remains unsolved [4]. Likewise confirmed has been the suggestion that design can increase protein stability beyond that enforced by natural selection. In recent years, deliberate single-residue modifications have raised protein stabilities through a variety of mechanisms [5,6]. Owing to design choices consistently biased toward stability, the protein alpha-4 has a stability of 22 kcal/mole, substantially greater than the 4-9 kcal/mole of typical natural proteins of similar size [3].
Successful protein engineering marks a milestone in a research agenda leading toward capabilities of broad technological significance [1,7].
The Attitude Control and Determination System controls the attitude of the spacecraft using a pair of magnetorquers and a passive magnet and determines the attitude of the spacecraft using a magnetometer and a pair of sun-sensors.
The camera uses CMOS technology and is capable of taking full colour pictures in the visual range at a ground resolution of about 100m per pixel, with an image size of 1280x1024 pixels. It will be used to take images of the Earth.
The S-Band unit is the secondary communications system. It contains a microwave transmitter and TNC and is capable of 38400bps data downlink, or transponding audio from UHF via three patch antennas (S-Band ANT), acting as a voice repeater for radio amateurs.
T-PODS - These three pods contain the three Cubesat passengers during the launch and coasting phases. After injection they will act as launcher tubes, ejecting the Cubesats from SSETI Express so that they can pursue their own missions.
SSETI Express will carry three small nano-satellites into orbit as passengers. These will be ejected from SSETI Express shortly after the launch, and will then undergo their own, separate, missions. The three cubesats are:
NCUBE-2 -Developed by the Andøya Rocket Range, Norway. This Cubesat will track boats around the Norwegian coastline (and one reindeer on land). [I, for one, welcome our new reindeer-tracking overlords!]
UWE-1 - Developed by the University of Würzburg, Germany. This Cubesat will test new communications protocols.
XI-V Developed by the University of Tokyo, Japan. This Cubesat will test commercial off-the-shelf technology and has a camera to take pictures of the Earth.
SSETI Express has two 'radios' on-board.
On UHF 437.250MHz there is a FM transceiver that can transmit and receive the AX25 packet telemetry and payload data at the data rate of 9k6bps. The transceiver produces approx 3 watts of RF output that feeds a canted 1/4 wave whip, which is mounted on the top plate. It incorporates a standard TNC7-Multi to convert the data to and from the OBC. It also has an audio and RSSI feed to the S-Band Tx. It was constructed by Holger Eckardt DF2FQ and is based upon his T7F UHF packet transceiver.
Communications - On S-Band there is a transmitter on 2401.835MHz which can transmit packet data at a data rate of 38k4bps. It can also be configured to work in a voice transponder configuration. It produces approximately 2.5 watts of RF output which feed a three way splitter to the three patch antennas. The enclosure, power splitter and antennas were provided by the University of Wroclaw SSETI team and the electronics were produced by five members of AMSAT-UK. The unit comprises of a switch mode power supply, exciter board, amplifier board, controller board and a sensor board. The TNC is identical to the TNC7 Multi being used in the UHF transceiver except that it is set for a different baud rate.
Typical Groundstation:
To receive data from SSETI Express the requirements are similar to those for previous 9k6 Pacsats.
To receive UHF telemetry, a steerable circularly polarised yagi with 12dBic gain with, preferably, a masthead preamplifier, should be satisfactory for reception of the data . The receiver must have an IF bandwidth of at least 20kHz and an audio output that is taken from the discriminator before any 'shaping'. This audio is then fed into a suitable KISS-enabled TNC which itself is connected to a PC normally via a serial port. To transmit to the satellite (when 'friendly telecommands' have been enabled) an RF output power of 10 watts on UHF should be sufficient.
To receive S-Band data, the antenna gain will need to be more than 21dBic and in this case RHCP (right hand circular polarisation) is a must. Again a mast mounted preamplifier will be required. As the data rate is 38k4bps the IF bandwidth will need to be approx 80kHz together with a K
Post in haste, repent at leisure - I checked Wkipedia and what I said is correct except technically it isn't called a nova, which is a word reserved for somthing which happens in white dwarfs in binary systems. But the Sun will use up the H in the core, and eventually expand into a red giant 1E3 - 1E4 times more luminous than now in a series of steps brought on by "He flashes" which might as well be novae as far as surviving them on Earth is concerned.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, it'll be great for many things, but the Cell is not IEEE compliant in its 32-bit arithmetic, so algorithms that depend on denormalized numbers or infinities matching the spec will break. This actually matters for a graphics approach that would otherwise be attractive for the Cell, conformal geometric algebra, where plane primitives are infinite spheres and line primitives are infinite circles.
IANAL but I believe that in British libel law the defendant must prove that the derogatory information was likely true, whereas in America the plaintiff must prove that the information was definitely not true and was made with reckless or knowing disregard for the facts. The British reporters just have way more balls than the Americans.
Hear, Hear!
How did the BJS change the methods of measuring the incidence of rape? What was being reported before, and what now? What were the changes in the conviction percentages, sentencing and parole policies during that time that would affect rape incarceration rates? It sounds like you are blowing smoke to cover up the fact that porn availability and rape are inversely correlated.
If so, at least there is an upside to all this hysterical religious nonsense.
Fine, but that says nothing in favor of internally contradictory mythologies such as Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism or Hinduism.
OK... you are a flaming nut. Genesis is a myth. If you believe it is literally true, you are wrong/i>. If you belive the Bible, Old Testament or New is not self- contradictory on both a literal and figurative level, you have not been thinking. If you think that theology is in any way a source of truth, you are deluded, and when you attempt to compare the Bible with quantum mechanics, you expose yourself as a fool.
Your religion deserves no respect, it is utterly and comletely false. The perversion of your mind by this hateful and puerile dogma is more wretched than any possible pornography.
Experience shows that people who say "experience shows" are too lazy to support their own arguments in any more substiantive way.
Not all - below the equivalent of a modern $3000 - $5000/yr per capita a country's life expectancy drops like a rock, whether now or 150 years ago. Above that amount makes almost no difference in life expectancy. Yet even in antiquity, above a certain wealth, modest by today's standards, anyone who made it to the age of seven and didn't birth children or engage in battle had a good chance of living to seventy or more.
There is relative poverty, but there is also absolute povery, where one cannot obtain food, protection from the elements, hygene, or basic medicine. The former hurts, but the latter tortures and kills.
Fair use can be justified under the "to promote the progress of ...arts" clause since fair use does not compete with or reduce the value of the original work in the marketplace, whereas in the "contractors get patents free for secret-stuff" case the incentive is in the direction of impeding the progress of the useful arts because it makes a useful application secret and it leads inventors to not bother disclosing stuff the government will just steal wholesale anyway.
Diesel and gasoline have very similar volumetric energy densities. Vegetable oil should be in the same ballpark, too. Liquid hydrocarbons are all pretty similar. I suspect that he is counting only the diesel in the fuel milage and not the oil, though, or else it's just some pumpkinseed-aerodynamic, near-motorcycle weight vehicle.
It was about cheap puppets making sarcastic comments about bad movies, thus selling ad time for movies that ordinarily would have required the Clockwork Orange conditioning chair to get people to watch. Calling them robots had nothing to do with the show's brilliant idea of flogging crap by making fun of old crap.
Agreed. Red Dwarf belongs near the top.
Absolutely - but who in their wrong mind could rank The Outer Limits # 13, behind even such garbage as Xena and Flash Gordon? TOL was almost the only real SF on the whole list besides the Twilight Zone! Space operas and open-ended "series" are ALL crap if you plug in your frontal lobes. Mere entertainment, sometimes with belabored pretentions to serious thought - but that's all.
Mercury wouldn't qualify under that definition unless you take atmosphere to mean thinner than many vacuum chambers on Earth. Many other posters have requited orbit around a star, which seems unjustified - you have the right idea in distinguishing a planet from a moon by whether it orbits another non-stellar object. Wandering planets should still be called planets. But I also think that two planets of similar size orbiting one another should both be planets - a reasonable rule would be if neither one is at least twice the mass of the other, then they're both planets. The spherical requrement is wrong since a spinning object will be an oblate spheroid; most or all planets including Earth are oblate to some extent. Futher, an iron planet formed by collision after a large impact could be very non-spherical and asymmetrical if it had already cooled before the impact. In order to have a definite, objective test that is as simple as possible, size should be the only criterion for calling an object not orbiting another planet a planet. The size requirement should be expansive enough to cover all the traditional planets, with the possible exception of Pluto. In borderline cases, and to be clear, the size should be expressed as volume, or equivalently in terms of diameter of a sphere of that volume. To make the notion of volume more precise and observable, some test for what counts as volume should be given, such as "absorbing or reflecting more than x% of visible light" or "having a density of at least 0.y g/cc".
If we want to choose a round number for the radius and/or keep Pluto as a planet:
0.419E10 km^3 - 1000km radius
Pluto 0.715E10 km^3- 1190km radius
If we want to choose a very round number for the volume and/or stop calling Pluto a planet:
1E10 km^3 - 1337km radius,
which is just too leet not to use.
I suggest reading all the articles on this page, but particularly "Guidelines for when to patent"
http://www.tinaja.com/patnt01.asp
But when your own militia is in Iraq, and the President makes you ship in some soldiers from Texas and tells them your neighbors are looters and insurgents...
What are you doing on Slashdot?
The Roman fasces (root of the word fascist) consists of an axe within a bundle of rods, bound by a red strap. As a symbol of state power, the rods were for beating prisoners, the axe for decapitating them.
This emblem on Mussolini's flag of office, the symbol of his Partito Nazionale Fascista, and the the present Guardia Civil (Franco's jackbooted thugs) can also be found on the the 1916-1945 US dimes, the Lincoln memorial chair; all over the US Capitol, including multiple copies on the Speaker's rostrum, the National Guard insignia, etc, etc,
Article I Section 8: "The Congress shall have Power ....To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries"
It does not say that Congress has the power to exempt the government from respecting the exclusive rights they have already secured for the inventor - otherwise it would mean the right was not in fact exclusive. Still less does it say that the government can exempt some corporation of which it is a customer from respecting the inventor's rights. By saying that the inventor cannot sue the private firm infringing the patent or or present facts mateeial to suc a suit, the patent has in fact been taken, since a patent is nothing but a right to buing suit in order to prevent unlicensed use. If the information needed to make the case is a governmental secret, then the least prejudicial remedy is to close that part of the hearing to the public and seal that portion of the record.
Even if the government believes it needs some patented invention for national security, it has no constitutional right to use it without the consent of the holder of the patent rights unless the government can demonstrate that it cannot effectively excercise its right to provide for the common defense without the use of the invention. Defense is not synonymous with military or intelligence use. The government should bear the burden of proof that the proposed use was indispensible in preventing or repelling a reasonably forseeable actual attack, and even then must provide just compesation for that use.
Are you claiming that HR knows how to do their job better than people who understand an actual subject - ANY subject? Or that financial advisors are somehow not giant weasels who could be replaced by a very small shell script with better results?
From the SSETI Express page:
Payload systems:
The Attitude Control and Determination System controls the attitude of the spacecraft using a pair of magnetorquers and a passive magnet and determines the attitude of the spacecraft using a magnetometer and a pair of sun-sensors.
The camera uses CMOS technology and is capable of taking full colour pictures in the visual range at a ground resolution of about 100m per pixel, with an image size of 1280x1024 pixels. It will be used to take images of the Earth.
The S-Band unit is the secondary communications system. It contains a microwave transmitter and TNC and is capable of 38400bps data downlink, or transponding audio from UHF via three patch antennas (S-Band ANT), acting as a voice repeater for radio amateurs.
T-PODS - These three pods contain the three Cubesat passengers during the launch and coasting phases. After injection they will act as launcher tubes, ejecting the Cubesats from SSETI Express so that they can pursue their own missions.
SSETI Express will carry three small nano-satellites into orbit as passengers. These will be ejected from SSETI Express shortly after the launch, and will then undergo their own, separate, missions.
The three cubesats are:
NCUBE-2 -Developed by the Andøya Rocket Range, Norway. This Cubesat will track boats around the Norwegian coastline (and one reindeer on land).
[I, for one, welcome our new reindeer-tracking overlords!]
UWE-1 - Developed by the University of Würzburg, Germany. This Cubesat will test new communications protocols.
XI-V Developed by the University of Tokyo, Japan. This Cubesat will test commercial off-the-shelf technology and has a camera to take pictures of the Earth.
SSETI Express has two 'radios' on-board.
On UHF 437.250MHz there is a FM transceiver that can transmit and receive the AX25 packet telemetry and payload data at the data rate of 9k6bps. The transceiver produces approx 3 watts of RF output that feeds a canted 1/4 wave whip, which is mounted on the top plate. It incorporates a standard TNC7-Multi to convert the data to and from the OBC. It also has an audio and RSSI feed to the S-Band Tx. It was constructed by Holger Eckardt DF2FQ and is based upon his T7F UHF packet transceiver.
Communications - On S-Band there is a transmitter on 2401.835MHz which can transmit packet data at a data rate of 38k4bps. It can also be configured to work in a voice transponder configuration. It produces approximately 2.5 watts of RF output which feed a three way splitter to the three patch antennas. The enclosure, power splitter and antennas were provided by the University of Wroclaw SSETI team and the electronics were produced by five members of AMSAT-UK. The unit comprises of a switch mode power supply, exciter board, amplifier board, controller board and a sensor board. The TNC is identical to the TNC7 Multi being used in the UHF transceiver except that it is set for a different baud rate.
Typical Groundstation:
To receive data from SSETI Express the requirements are similar to those for previous 9k6 Pacsats.
To receive UHF telemetry, a steerable circularly polarised yagi with 12dBic gain with, preferably, a masthead preamplifier, should be satisfactory for reception of the data . The receiver must have an IF bandwidth of at least 20kHz and an audio output that is taken from the discriminator before any 'shaping'. This audio is then fed into a suitable KISS-enabled TNC which itself is connected to a PC normally via a serial port. To transmit to the satellite (when 'friendly telecommands' have been enabled) an RF output power of 10 watts on UHF should be sufficient.
To receive S-Band data, the antenna gain will need to be more than 21dBic and in this case RHCP (right hand circular polarisation) is a must. Again a mast mounted preamplifier will be required. As the data rate is 38k4bps the IF bandwidth will need to be approx 80kHz together with a K
microamps - the lower-case "mu" didn't survive.
Post in haste, repent at leisure - I checked Wkipedia and what I said is correct except technically it isn't called a nova, which is a word reserved for somthing which happens in white dwarfs in binary systems. But the Sun will use up the H in the core, and eventually expand into a red giant 1E3 - 1E4 times more luminous than now in a series of steps brought on by "He flashes" which might as well be novae as far as surviving them on Earth is concerned.