I hope by the time humans finally walk on Mars, it's still there so it can be preserved.
However, the implications of the rover no longer being where it is assumed to be would be... interesting.
Might make for a good start of a sci-fi horror movie... or comedy.
Just reopen the mines that were deemed unprofitable when China still flooded the market with "dirt cheap" rare earth metals.
Really. There's no actual shortage of the stuff. There's just a shortage of mines that produce them cheaper than China did back then. Market prices rise? Well, I guess those old unused mines might become profitable again.
gigawatts of radio waves put into space: check
at a wavelength interesting to astronomers: check
low--frequency modulation, common phase: check (think Fourier analysis over months of data to filter out unmodulated light of a nearby star)
characteristic spectral fingerprint of artificial light: check
not limited to a civilisation's "radio window": check
You're assuming that Westinghouse won on the aliens planet.
I mean... it's scary that they need a law for that. What's next, employers asking for your credit card information, atm card pin numbers, preferred sex position and another gazillion of very private bits of information that have no relation whatsoever to the job?
Why only limit the explanation to software? There are tons of other documents that should have some sort of revision control (especially when you're dealing with a quality management system - there's documents describing processes all over the place).
Anyway. To describe revision control to a nontechnical person, get away from software. Use a novel as an example, which consists of different chapters. Revision control will help the writer organize the various drafts of each chapter and which drafts together form a draft of the actual novel. Revision control also helps the writer keep inconsistencies out of the novel (e.g. the murderer was character A in early drafts, but changed to character B in later ones, etc).
Q: You are standing in Bern railway station; you see a train coming in; you look at your watch and see that the train is late; What are the two possible explanations?
A1) it's not a Swiss watch.
A2) it's not a Swiss train.
Apple added A3) "Your phone say you're in Bern, but you actually aren't."
> It's also got fairly good licensing terms - I mean the OS can be replicated (it is billions of times - once for ever cell),
Yeah, right. But use the wrong process for replication, and you'll end up paying for it for almost two decades! How's that for vendor lock-in?
> Premium cost = average accident rate * average accident cost + insurance company margin
And here's the problem: The data to base these averages on is ridiculously small for autonomous vehicles. Some would even say it's nonexistent.
I assume that in order to actually have one of these things drive on public roads, insurance is required? And which insurance company will insure this relatively incalculable risk, and at what price?
The laser is only for cats the keep a respectful distance. Any other cat will be irradiated to death with neutrons from the on-board fusion reactor (the one in the DAN experiment).
... when the two participants of the call speak English with two different, heavy accents. And the phone line has the quality of your typical American phone line, i.e. noisy, bandwidth-limited, _and_ digitally compressed and uncompressed at least twice.
Small errors leads to metabolisms that weren't just more resistant to oxygen (remember that it's a nasty poison to anything that's not used to it), but that could acutally use it to generate energy (in fact, more efficiently than by anaerobic metabolism). That opened up whole new habitats. Exponential growth ensues.
A German company solved this exact problem years ago, when trying to find a way to reconstruct documents of the former East German Staatssicherheit that had been shredded.
Oh, and they're not dealing 10000 pieces various documents, they're dealing with 10000 bags full of pieces of shredded documents. Crowd-source that.
Anyone who has mastered FTL travel will be impossible to stop.
In fact, anyone who has mastered somewhat directed inter-stellar travel, even at sub-lightspeed, will be impossible to stop.
If they've mastered accelerating physical objects to even a significant fraction of c, then they could wipe us out before we even know about them just by slamming an object (any object) into any point on the earth.
No significant fraction of c necessary at all. All "they" would need is a space rock of sufficient size (which our solar system has plenty of), a large enough thruster, a few decades, and an "out of the sun" trajectory so we have no idea what's coming.
So... they're marketing an intentional, crippling flaw in the product as a "feature"? Way to go. This beats marketing unintentional bugs as "hidden features" a thousand times over.
We're not in the 1980s or 1990s anymore, when monitors, especially large ones, would cost thousands of dollars.
Simple calculation: A monitors costs, what, $250? And now consider that it might save the developer just one or two minutes each day that he'd otherwise spend on switching between windows, resizing them, getting reoriented, etc. The extra monitor will pay for itself in a few months.
Slashdot Mirror
I hope by the time humans finally walk on Mars, it's still there so it can be preserved. ... interesting. ... or comedy.
However, the implications of the rover no longer being where it is assumed to be would be
Might make for a good start of a sci-fi horror movie
I'm curious ... can you elaborate on how exactly they fail?
Do their attempts just have stupid bugs or is the whole approach wrong?
I'd probably fail at "printing". Only writing code for devices without any human-targetted outputs does that to you. :P
Really. There's no actual shortage of the stuff. There's just a shortage of mines that produce them cheaper than China did back then. Market prices rise? Well, I guess those old unused mines might become profitable again.
You're assuming that Westinghouse won on the aliens planet.
I mean ... it's scary that they need a law for that. What's next, employers asking for your credit card information, atm card pin numbers, preferred sex position and another gazillion of very private bits of information that have no relation whatsoever to the job?
Anyway. To describe revision control to a nontechnical person, get away from software. Use a novel as an example, which consists of different chapters. Revision control will help the writer organize the various drafts of each chapter and which drafts together form a draft of the actual novel. Revision control also helps the writer keep inconsistencies out of the novel (e.g. the murderer was character A in early drafts, but changed to character B in later ones, etc).
Q: You are standing in Bern railway station; you see a train coming in; you look at your watch and see that the train is late; What are the two possible explanations?
A1) it's not a Swiss watch.
A2) it's not a Swiss train.
Apple added A3) "Your phone say you're in Bern, but you actually aren't."
> It's also got fairly good licensing terms - I mean the OS can be replicated (it is billions of times - once for ever cell), Yeah, right. But use the wrong process for replication, and you'll end up paying for it for almost two decades! How's that for vendor lock-in?
> Premium cost = average accident rate * average accident cost + insurance company margin
And here's the problem: The data to base these averages on is ridiculously small for autonomous vehicles. Some would even say it's nonexistent.
I assume that in order to actually have one of these things drive on public roads, insurance is required? And which insurance company will insure this relatively incalculable risk, and at what price?
"Starflight" called and wants it plot back.
> And we have set the example that such a machine can be robotic, and impervious to microbes.
Earth microbes, maybe. Mars microbes, on the other hand ...
The laser is only for cats the keep a respectful distance. Any other cat will be irradiated to death with neutrons from the on-board fusion reactor (the one in the DAN experiment).
... when the two participants of the call speak English with two different, heavy accents. And the phone line has the quality of your typical American phone line, i.e. noisy, bandwidth-limited, _and_ digitally compressed and uncompressed at least twice.
I'll take the live chat, thanks.
They must know more than everyone else.
Imagining that at some point you could be stuck in a vat and have your brain regrown would likely mean that you would largely be a whole new person.
It's not organ donation, it's whole body donation, to an entirely new person.
... evolution. That wasn't all that hard, was it?
Small errors leads to metabolisms that weren't just more resistant to oxygen (remember that it's a nasty poison to anything that's not used to it), but that could acutally use it to generate energy (in fact, more efficiently than by anaerobic metabolism). That opened up whole new habitats. Exponential growth ensues.
A German company solved this exact problem years ago, when trying to find a way to reconstruct documents of the former East German Staatssicherheit that had been shredded.
Oh, and they're not dealing 10000 pieces various documents, they're dealing with 10000 bags full of pieces of shredded documents. Crowd-source that.
... beats HAL9000s insanity with pure, unadulterated malice.
So, nothing evil ever came from a male computer, either.
In fact, anyone who has mastered somewhat directed inter-stellar travel, even at sub-lightspeed, will be impossible to stop.
If they've mastered accelerating physical objects to even a significant fraction of c, then they could wipe us out before we even know about them just by slamming an object (any object) into any point on the earth.
No significant fraction of c necessary at all. All "they" would need is a space rock of sufficient size (which our solar system has plenty of), a large enough thruster, a few decades, and an "out of the sun" trajectory so we have no idea what's coming.
... sound more like a list of fun things to do (which most kids will find irresistible).
So ... they're marketing an intentional, crippling flaw in the product as a "feature"? Way to go. This beats marketing unintentional bugs as "hidden features" a thousand times over.
... is mandatory, and the laws after the first are by no means optional.
Simple calculation: A monitors costs, what, $250? And now consider that it might save the developer just one or two minutes each day that he'd otherwise spend on switching between windows, resizing them, getting reoriented, etc. The extra monitor will pay for itself in a few months.
Optical spectrometry might work for certain isotopes, too. Again, you'll need long observation times.