Way back when Russia was lifting much heavier loads into space than the USA could manage, some (NASA?) people got to wondering out loud how they managed to do that.
One suggestion I recall was that they had a stretch of basically railway track, and an electric(?) locomotive+spacecraft-holder+spacecraft. That whole assembly was accelerated along the track. Towards the end, at high speed, the track angled upwards and about then the rockets fired up, lifting the spacecraft off of the locomotive+spacecraft-holder, which was decelerated and retained for reuse.
So the rockets got off to a flying start, and were carrying no unnecesary weight.
If that was such a nifty-seeming idea back then, could it not still be a nifty idea?
How about a project that explores millions of unlikely chains of events. It would record all the events, and if any event-sets were to result in unimagined but catastrophic failure, an analysis of the inputs would probably uncover some interesting facts.
This could be run by a distributed computing project, like SETI, Folding etc.
Toyota would probably not want to facilitate unauthorized analysis of the processors' code etc, but that could all be sealed in a Black Box so as not to be available except to the project client code, and the inputs & outputs would be encrypted and communicated from/to Toyota (or some appropriate authority).
The LightScribe feature on some CD & DVD disks/drives appears to be close to what you want to achieve, i.e. it writes 'bits' that create a visible graphics design ("bits anywhere & everywhere"), without regard to what the bits mean as data.
So if you can find the tricks behind that, you might be able to find someone who can implement a similar scheme in a HD.
If a/the government authority was enabled to declare an infected PC as a weapon, they could then come up with some pretext to attack it.
Not suggesting this though, as the cure might well be worse than the disease.
Thinx: since US Border Security can seize almost any device having data storage, with no evidence, why do they quibble about finding & disabling real threats that operate within their borders?
Silver corrodes quickly in open air, that's why most supermarkets sell silver polish. IIRC, the culprit is sulphur.
I've had two gizmo failures due to silver contact corrosion, and sulphur was the cause. Silver sulphide is black and apparently a decent insulator (or poor conductor).
My local sulphur source is "sour gas" (Methane contaminated with Hydrogen Sulphide). The H2S is (mostly) removed in gas processing plants before entering the pipeline as 'natural gas', but some small amount escapes to the atmosphere.
OMG, who uses PNG files?! The compression routine is rubbish! I'm going to use this technology, but I'm going to convert the files to JPEG before I upload them. When people see how much smaller the file is that they have to download, they'll quickly move over to my way of thinking.
Those of us that need lossless compression, but we use SuperPNG, which has better compression.
The conversion to JPEG might be a disappointment - my gut feel says this torrent trick won't work if the data are altered by JPEG's lossy compression.
Re:Blocks by indentation
on
Hello World!
·
· Score: 1
because it makes sense.
Back in the 1960s & 70s I was working for IBM, when PL/I appeared. It uses Do... End to delineate blocks, and I was OK with that but then found it wasn't enough. So I developed an indentation scheme, jogging right at a Do and jogging back left at an End
(white space is ignored in PL/I). This made it much easier to grasp the logical flow at a glance. Unfortunately I didn't keep any examples when I quit programming, but I think it would look remarkably similar to Python (except for the Do & End keywords).
While I was living in Britain in the late 1970s, the BBC announced a new evening radio programme to cover the Arts & Sciences in more depth. For a few weeks it looked promising, but the ratio or Arts to Science gradually tilted towards the Arts and the Science withered to a few occasional short items.
I assumed that this was due to the Beeb being inhabited primarily by Arts people, who love to talk about their work, whereas the Science people were busy elsewhere doing their science.
Here in Canada the CBC has an hour of science a week (Quirks & Quarks, Saturday mid-day & repeated one late evening), which is quite decent (at the interested lay people level). They cover three or four topics in some depth.
But the CBC's Arts programming greatly exceeds it.
re "hurricanes are known to strike on a somewhat regular basis"
if they were 'regular', we'd know when and where they would occur, and could more easily avoid their consequences.
I suggest that 'frequent' is a better description of their occurrence patterns.
Many years ago, in a Usenet discussion, I was musing on this topic. I pointed out that even mankind's most powerful tools, e.g. a nuclear explosion, were puny compared to the energy in a hurricane. (Of course some twit chastised me for suggesting we drop nuclear bombs on hurricanes).
I suggested that rather than trying to overpower a hurricane, we might find a way to turn its energy against itself, rather like in some of the martial arts, where a small opponent overcomes a much larger one. But nobody suggested how that might be achieved.
A few years ago I heard of another approach, which is to cover the ocean with a thin film of (biodegradable) oil, which would greatly reduce the evaporation of water vapour (& energy) from the surface. The suggested way to achieve this was to soak straw bales with the oil and drop them from aircraft. I have not heard whether this has been tried yet.
The oldest known written story, The Epic of Gilgamesh, was written in cuneiform on clay tablets, about 8000 years ago. They were probably baked (or perhaps just kept dry). Some of these still exist and are as readable as when they were written.
Some combination of current technology with modern ceramics might work well. Store them in a deep mountain cave in Utah.
I don't know enough about PostScript's capabilities, but it might be up to the task, though perhaps the users would not, without some more-friendly front end.
BTW Don Lancaster claims that he writes [mostly everything] in it, and has very fine control over the output.
http://www.anastigmatix.net/postscript/direct.html
In the early 1980's I hacked the PostScript output file of Corel Draw, to correct a scaling problem with a large image, which was tiled. I had never encountered PostScript before, but had some Forth experience, which made it do-able (but not simple).
Not quite expropriation...
AFAIK the property owners were compensated, based on the declared value of their property, as listed in the property tax rolls.
Citizendium has some features intended (& designed) to address several of the concerns that Wikipedia has raised.
Obviously it will have a long way to go before it encompasses Wikipedia's breadth, though it's depth should be as good or better from the start.
Citizendium starts here:
http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Main_Page
With some probably minor inconvenience, you could fix that by using a Zipped archive.
And someone will likely come up with a low-impact solution based on that.
When the scientific community found that 'their' internet was being corrupted and otherwise stressed by uses and abuses way beyond its original design intent, they went off and formed their own a few years ago (I can't remember or find its name).
We 'ordinary users' need a piece carved out for 'us', where anyone else plays only by our rules.
I have no proposals re how to accomplish such a thing, since all that 'dark fiber' is owned by megacorps.
Perhaps something like the old-time short-wave Ham Radio, provided and operated by its user/owners.
Slashdot Mirror
Way back when Russia was lifting much heavier loads into space than the USA could manage, some (NASA?) people got to wondering out loud how they managed to do that. One suggestion I recall was that they had a stretch of basically railway track, and an electric(?) locomotive+spacecraft-holder+spacecraft. That whole assembly was accelerated along the track. Towards the end, at high speed, the track angled upwards and about then the rockets fired up, lifting the spacecraft off of the locomotive+spacecraft-holder, which was decelerated and retained for reuse. So the rockets got off to a flying start, and were carrying no unnecesary weight. If that was such a nifty-seeming idea back then, could it not still be a nifty idea?
BoA_Destructor
You mean like PC-BSD's PBIs?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pengrowth_Saddledome
http://www.canada.com/calgaryherald/news/story.html?id=bb367c51-527e-4abc-b61a-39821fa3f0f9
"Working with British structural engineer Jan Bobrowski, whose firm still lists the Saddledome on its website, the design team came up with the concept of a roof made of precast concrete panels supported by a net of cables. Think of it as a giant tennis racket, a grid of cables, and on this net you drop these concrete panels,"
How about a project that explores millions of unlikely chains of events. It would record all the events, and if any event-sets were to result in unimagined but catastrophic failure, an analysis of the inputs would probably uncover some interesting facts. This could be run by a distributed computing project, like SETI, Folding etc. Toyota would probably not want to facilitate unauthorized analysis of the processors' code etc, but that could all be sealed in a Black Box so as not to be available except to the project client code, and the inputs & outputs would be encrypted and communicated from/to Toyota (or some appropriate authority).
The LightScribe feature on some CD & DVD disks/drives appears to be close to what you want to achieve, i.e. it writes 'bits' that create a visible graphics design ("bits anywhere & everywhere"), without regard to what the bits mean as data. So if you can find the tricks behind that, you might be able to find someone who can implement a similar scheme in a HD.
If a/the government authority was enabled to declare an infected PC as a weapon, they could then come up with some pretext to attack it. Not suggesting this though, as the cure might well be worse than the disease. Thinx: since US Border Security can seize almost any device having data storage, with no evidence, why do they quibble about finding & disabling real threats that operate within their borders?
and if you want it more so, there is PC-BSD (Free BSD with (good) lipstick).
Merdoch (or his minons) did you perhaps mean to type Moloch?
"Future considerations".
"All your base-pair are belong to us" True in some cases, unfortunately, thanks to the USPTO allowing patents on naturally-occurring structures.
I'm probably a minority taste, but I'd pay to have f*ck & sh*t eliminated.
Silver corrodes quickly in open air, that's why most supermarkets sell silver polish. IIRC, the culprit is sulphur.
I've had two gizmo failures due to silver contact corrosion, and sulphur was the cause. Silver sulphide is black and apparently a decent insulator (or poor conductor).
My local sulphur source is "sour gas" (Methane contaminated with Hydrogen Sulphide). The H2S is (mostly) removed in gas processing plants before entering the pipeline as 'natural gas', but some small amount escapes to the atmosphere.
OMG, who uses PNG files?! The compression routine is rubbish! I'm going to use this technology, but I'm going to convert the files to JPEG before I upload them. When people see how much smaller the file is that they have to download, they'll quickly move over to my way of thinking.
Those of us that need lossless compression, but we use SuperPNG, which has better compression.
The conversion to JPEG might be a disappointment - my gut feel says this torrent trick won't work if the data are altered by JPEG's lossy compression.
because it makes sense. Back in the 1960s & 70s I was working for IBM, when PL/I appeared. It uses Do... End to delineate blocks, and I was OK with that but then found it wasn't enough. So I developed an indentation scheme, jogging right at a Do and jogging back left at an End (white space is ignored in PL/I). This made it much easier to grasp the logical flow at a glance. Unfortunately I didn't keep any examples when I quit programming, but I think it would look remarkably similar to Python (except for the Do & End keywords).
While I was living in Britain in the late 1970s, the BBC announced a new evening radio programme to cover the Arts & Sciences in more depth. For a few weeks it looked promising, but the ratio or Arts to Science gradually tilted towards the Arts and the Science withered to a few occasional short items. I assumed that this was due to the Beeb being inhabited primarily by Arts people, who love to talk about their work, whereas the Science people were busy elsewhere doing their science. Here in Canada the CBC has an hour of science a week (Quirks & Quarks, Saturday mid-day & repeated one late evening), which is quite decent (at the interested lay people level). They cover three or four topics in some depth. But the CBC's Arts programming greatly exceeds it.
re "hurricanes are known to strike on a somewhat regular basis" if they were 'regular', we'd know when and where they would occur, and could more easily avoid their consequences. I suggest that 'frequent' is a better description of their occurrence patterns.
Many years ago, in a Usenet discussion, I was musing on this topic. I pointed out that even mankind's most powerful tools, e.g. a nuclear explosion, were puny compared to the energy in a hurricane. (Of course some twit chastised me for suggesting we drop nuclear bombs on hurricanes). I suggested that rather than trying to overpower a hurricane, we might find a way to turn its energy against itself, rather like in some of the martial arts, where a small opponent overcomes a much larger one. But nobody suggested how that might be achieved. A few years ago I heard of another approach, which is to cover the ocean with a thin film of (biodegradable) oil, which would greatly reduce the evaporation of water vapour (& energy) from the surface. The suggested way to achieve this was to soak straw bales with the oil and drop them from aircraft. I have not heard whether this has been tried yet.
The oldest known written story, The Epic of Gilgamesh, was written in cuneiform on clay tablets, about 8000 years ago. They were probably baked (or perhaps just kept dry). Some of these still exist and are as readable as when they were written. Some combination of current technology with modern ceramics might work well. Store them in a deep mountain cave in Utah.
I don't know enough about PostScript's capabilities, but it might be up to the task, though perhaps the users would not, without some more-friendly front end. BTW Don Lancaster claims that he writes [mostly everything] in it, and has very fine control over the output. http://www.anastigmatix.net/postscript/direct.html In the early 1980's I hacked the PostScript output file of Corel Draw, to correct a scaling problem with a large image, which was tiled. I had never encountered PostScript before, but had some Forth experience, which made it do-able (but not simple).
Not quite expropriation... AFAIK the property owners were compensated, based on the declared value of their property, as listed in the property tax rolls.
Citizendium has some features intended (& designed) to address several of the concerns that Wikipedia has raised. Obviously it will have a long way to go before it encompasses Wikipedia's breadth, though it's depth should be as good or better from the start. Citizendium starts here: http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Main_Page
With some probably minor inconvenience, you could fix that by using a Zipped archive. And someone will likely come up with a low-impact solution based on that.
Aha! So that's why Windows has such a miniscule market share.
When the scientific community found that 'their' internet was being corrupted and otherwise stressed by uses and abuses way beyond its original design intent, they went off and formed their own a few years ago (I can't remember or find its name). We 'ordinary users' need a piece carved out for 'us', where anyone else plays only by our rules. I have no proposals re how to accomplish such a thing, since all that 'dark fiber' is owned by megacorps. Perhaps something like the old-time short-wave Ham Radio, provided and operated by its user/owners.