This may be offtopic, but whoever modded this post down obviously did it only because he/she didn't agree with
the AC's opinion.
The post you recommend is being AC-posted to practically every/. thread these days, practically unmodified. There's a similar version dooming & glooming *BSD.
IMHO, this is just tomorrow's goatse / body thetans / frist p0st, and the troll moderation it got is all that it deserves.
Actually you could use [ssn].[first].[last].us. Athough SSNs are not unique, no SSN should be assigned to two
people with the same name.
They're not? Are you sure? This is absolutely not a troll; but your claim refutes things that I've always thought true, and that I'd thought that I had seen sufficient evidence for.
EINs and SSNs might conflict -- I'm not asserting that they do, but logically they might commingle in the same 9-digit-identifier space -- but please inform us, absent identity theft, whether two different people might find themselves with the same SSN, absent fraud or some other deception.
The coincidence is quite remarkable, but the numbers don't seem right for this to be Nemesis. (It may have Nemesis-like effects when it gets here, but still.)
This thing is 65 light-years away. Now, I haven't run the numbers through Kepler's Third Law, but my intuition is that anything that far out, and in an actual orbit, would have an orbital period in the billions of years-plus area. Not a mere 30 million years or so.
The space.com page you linked to contains this diagram which shows the predicted orbital range for Nemesis to be in the 1- to 3-lightyear separation range. This seems plausible, and I'll bet the astronomers who came up with it have run the numbers through the Third Law and liked what they saw.
Even with a highly eliptical orbit, it doesn't gel that the star would be 65 light-years away and due to arrive in a mere 1.5 million years (out of a 30 year cycle.) That would mean that it's been swinging around for a long while and is "almost here." How far away would it have to swing, 700 light-years? With that sort of range, we'd never have a regular period for it of 30 million years. Other stars would capture it, or otherwise screw up its orbit, as it swung by.
This is technically off topic to the exact question at hand, but may be relevant to some readers. One successful system I implemented for work had both; because it was itself a shell script, all its variables were environment variables. This led to some unforseen advantages.
This was a utility that I chose to implement as a couple of bash scripts. It stored and retrived the state of the system in a config file consisting of environment variable assignments, which it could in turn source back in. The big unforseen benefit was that the system could change its state by making edits to the file, then sourcing it in again, and it would automagically inherit the self-consistent edited new state. (So long as the edits were logically correct, at any rate; but I didn't have to make parallel edits to the config and to the runtime state.)
I admit again, this doesn't map strongly to the exact literal question at hand. The parts of this design that did are:
the system was installed by modification to, at most, $PATH, in the users' environments; and
the script itself contained a hardcoded path to its metaconfig file in a standard location.
As far as I know, the DOD got unlimited but not exclusive use of the bandwidth. That wouldn't preclude the buyers from selling the leftovers to the market.
This post seems to say as much (and it's +5) but the link it gives now points to a news page which is no longer relevant.
If it were, it might be at one end of a chamber, clinging to the side by surface tension. With any vigorous swimming, it'd probably wind up with gobs of water and air flying around; but one huge ball of water in the center of the room would never stay there.
But this won't happen for financial reasons. It costs about $5000 to boost a pound of payload into orbit. 8 pounds of water to a gallon, three gallons to the cubic foot, hundreds of square feet to a swimming pool, and this space pond costs 60 million dollars for a lousy 500 cubic foot pool.
And that's before evaporation.
Now, if they can harvest a passing comet and get the water out of that, they wouldn't have to pay for the delta vee and maybe this could be tried. But not soon.
OK; having read the comments, and then the article, this occurs to me, and doesn't seem to have been mentioned or proposed.
All these craft are still within the heliopause and will be so for a long time. They're moving outward faster than the solar wind, which means they're flying into it. The vacuum of space is only mostly a vacuum, remember, so the combined impacts of many little atoms will add up over time. The Pioneer craft, in particular, have been out there 20+ years, so the culmulative effects have had time to add up, and these would tend to slow the crafts over time. This effect is not negligible, or solar sails wouldn't work.
Also, as probably a lesser effect, there's all the virtual particles that are springing up in front of the craft and getting run into before they can meet their natural antipartners. These also will register as mass impacts and tend to slow the vehicles.
The first cause in particular will only get worse when the first craft hits the heliopause. At that point, it will no longer be plowing along with, but faster, than our Sun's wind, but head on into new solar winds. I wonder how much more difficult this makes it to come up with enough energy for eventual real interstellar travel.
Just a late night thought or two... but it doesn't seem unreasonable.
Back in the day, let me tell you, we had some powerful computers. Why, this here 486 DX2/66 was a serious processor, back in the day. Good enough for Windows NT, and still plays a respectable game of Doom from time to time.
So when this system was new, I gradually decked it out with one too many gadgets. Multiport serial boards, CD-ROMs, hard drives, tape drive, I don't know, but at some point it started needing more power than the dinky little supply in the mini-tower case could provide. And I couldn't find a supply with enough juice that would fit the enclosure.
So I got a big supply, set it on top of the case with the cover off, and ran the wires down to power the motherboard and all the rest. With a spot-fan on the CPU, no worries there, and nothing else gets hot enough to cause any trouble.
Maybe this approach wouldn't work on these newfangled, high-MHz, noise-sensitive systems they've got these days. Or maybe it wouldn't be a problem, as it isn't for me. Someone would have to try it.
Incidentally the system is still overpowered for what it does... it runs a dialup BBS and has a custom alarm clock from hell to get me up in the AM. (Wasn't that one of the apps CmdrTaco wanted in the BorgBox?)
Even though S.1618 was never passed, the spam disclaimer about it almost always follows the same template. This procmail recipe has caught countless spams for me:
:0B:
* message is (being )?sent (to you )?in compliance
junk.mai
Yes, I name all my mail folders *.mai. It's a VMS holdover habit, what can I say?
Aurora watchers can go here to see current auroral activity at any time, extrapolated from polar satellite imagery. Both Northern and Southern hemispheres are covered.
I've never been priviliged to see an aurora for myself. From what I understand they can't be done justice in photos. So my question is for anyone who's seen them... in photos, it seems usually there will be trees, hills, or other ground landmarks in the shot, suggesting that aurorae are usually low in the sky. But from the satellite pictures, they seem to cover the entire sky. Do they ever? Or if they only appear near the horizon, why is that?
I second this. AS&S has a great catalog with some really unusual and useful stuff.
To tie in with this topic, my last purchase there included a cool physics toy - the Chaos Tower. It's a construction toy with a chain that hauls balls to the top of your design, where they follow tracks, bounce off trampolines, switch on pendulums, etc. I've had one for a week now and it's a lot of fun!
AS&S has two sizes - just search for "goldberg". They're selling it about $20 cheaper than at the manufacturer's site ($129 for the large kit.) This should be affordable for schools as well as for geeks.
Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with either company. But I've been an AS&S customer since the days they were called JerryCo.
I don't know about anyone else, but I would have found that article more informative with a diagram or two by way of example. Where is this new intersection point located in some example triangles?
A.png is worth 2KB (1k words? Erm, sorry.)
But seriously... this is interesting, though maybe not interesting enough for me to want to take the time to try to duplicate the kid's theorem (without any formulas given) and draw a picture for myself. How lazy is the paper that they can't waste a column-inch (even on their Web posting) on a simple illustration or two?
(I think) he just means that you can't rely on your employees to have all the great ideas, to the exclusion of anyone else's employees having any.
The right ideas, the right place and the right resources are probably all required to do well in the grand dance of capitalism... having a monopoly of all the good ideas just isn't possible.
It's mentioned on the second page of the HowThingsWork article. Apparently the battery (chemistry unspecified) slips over the end of the phone after the primary assembly is complete.
For those who don't remember, about 6 months ago the US government decided to make military-grade GPS available to civilian GPS systems. This made them much more accurate as to location, speed, etc. However they reserved the right to turn the system back down to pre-SA levels at any time, per area of the world, as National Security or government whim dictates.
Now, for all the posters who ask, what will happen if there's a building or a cloud? Will the engine cut out? I wonder about another risk; if the US decides to back off of Selective Availability, what happens to cars in motion that find themselves suddenly hundreds of meters from where they were just a moment ago, due to suddenly and purposefully inaccurate data from the birds?
Slashdot Mirror
The post you recommend is being AC-posted to practically every /. thread these days, practically unmodified. There's a similar version dooming & glooming *BSD.
IMHO, this is just tomorrow's goatse / body thetans / frist p0st, and the troll moderation it got is all that it deserves.
--
They're not? Are you sure? This is absolutely not a troll; but your claim refutes things that I've always thought true, and that I'd thought that I had seen sufficient evidence for.
EINs and SSNs might conflict -- I'm not asserting that they do, but logically they might commingle in the same 9-digit-identifier space -- but please inform us, absent identity theft, whether two different people might find themselves with the same SSN, absent fraud or some other deception.
--
This thing is 65 light-years away. Now, I haven't run the numbers through Kepler's Third Law, but my intuition is that anything that far out, and in an actual orbit, would have an orbital period in the billions of years-plus area. Not a mere 30 million years or so.
The space.com page you linked to contains this diagram which shows the predicted orbital range for Nemesis to be in the 1- to 3-lightyear separation range. This seems plausible, and I'll bet the astronomers who came up with it have run the numbers through the Third Law and liked what they saw.
Even with a highly eliptical orbit, it doesn't gel that the star would be 65 light-years away and due to arrive in a mere 1.5 million years (out of a 30 year cycle.) That would mean that it's been swinging around for a long while and is "almost here." How far away would it have to swing, 700 light-years? With that sort of range, we'd never have a regular period for it of 30 million years. Other stars would capture it, or otherwise screw up its orbit, as it swung by.
So, intruiging, but I believe, wrong.
--
$ kill -9 $PPID
Is that "no affect"? Or did you mean () subshells? From those, $$ should work.
--
In vanilla xterms,
For other term types:
On my DOS box, of course, it's different;
--
This was a utility that I chose to implement as a couple of bash scripts. It stored and retrived the state of the system in a config file consisting of environment variable assignments, which it could in turn source back in. The big unforseen benefit was that the system could change its state by making edits to the file, then sourcing it in again, and it would automagically inherit the self-consistent edited new state. (So long as the edits were logically correct, at any rate; but I didn't have to make parallel edits to the config and to the runtime state.)
I admit again, this doesn't map strongly to the exact literal question at hand. The parts of this design that did are:
Hope someone finds this useful.
--
This post seems to say as much (and it's +5) but the link it gives now points to a news page which is no longer relevant.
--
If it were, it might be at one end of a chamber, clinging to the side by surface tension. With any vigorous swimming, it'd probably wind up with gobs of water and air flying around; but one huge ball of water in the center of the room would never stay there.
But this won't happen for financial reasons. It costs about $5000 to boost a pound of payload into orbit. 8 pounds of water to a gallon, three gallons to the cubic foot, hundreds of square feet to a swimming pool, and this space pond costs 60 million dollars for a lousy 500 cubic foot pool. And that's before evaporation.
Now, if they can harvest a passing comet and get the water out of that, they wouldn't have to pay for the delta vee and maybe this could be tried. But not soon.
--
Yeah, wow, man, it feels like I'm floating! And hey, I'm seeing stars! Far out man!
--
All these craft are still within the heliopause and will be so for a long time. They're moving outward faster than the solar wind, which means they're flying into it. The vacuum of space is only mostly a vacuum, remember, so the combined impacts of many little atoms will add up over time. The Pioneer craft, in particular, have been out there 20+ years, so the culmulative effects have had time to add up, and these would tend to slow the crafts over time. This effect is not negligible, or solar sails wouldn't work.
Also, as probably a lesser effect, there's all the virtual particles that are springing up in front of the craft and getting run into before they can meet their natural antipartners. These also will register as mass impacts and tend to slow the vehicles.
The first cause in particular will only get worse when the first craft hits the heliopause. At that point, it will no longer be plowing along with, but faster, than our Sun's wind, but head on into new solar winds. I wonder how much more difficult this makes it to come up with enough energy for eventual real interstellar travel.
Just a late night thought or two... but it doesn't seem unreasonable.
--
So when this system was new, I gradually decked it out with one too many gadgets. Multiport serial boards, CD-ROMs, hard drives, tape drive, I don't know, but at some point it started needing more power than the dinky little supply in the mini-tower case could provide. And I couldn't find a supply with enough juice that would fit the enclosure.
So I got a big supply, set it on top of the case with the cover off, and ran the wires down to power the motherboard and all the rest. With a spot-fan on the CPU, no worries there, and nothing else gets hot enough to cause any trouble.
Maybe this approach wouldn't work on these newfangled, high-MHz, noise-sensitive systems they've got these days. Or maybe it wouldn't be a problem, as it isn't for me. Someone would have to try it.
Incidentally the system is still overpowered for what it does... it runs a dialup BBS and has a custom alarm clock from hell to get me up in the AM. (Wasn't that one of the apps CmdrTaco wanted in the BorgBox?)
--
* message is (being )?sent (to you )?in compliance
junk.mai
Yes, I name all my mail folders *.mai. It's a VMS holdover habit, what can I say?
--
I've never been priviliged to see an aurora for myself. From what I understand they can't be done justice in photos. So my question is for anyone who's seen them... in photos, it seems usually there will be trees, hills, or other ground landmarks in the shot, suggesting that aurorae are usually low in the sky. But from the satellite pictures, they seem to cover the entire sky. Do they ever? Or if they only appear near the horizon, why is that?
--
To tie in with this topic, my last purchase there included a cool physics toy - the Chaos Tower. It's a construction toy with a chain that hauls balls to the top of your design, where they follow tracks, bounce off trampolines, switch on pendulums, etc. I've had one for a week now and it's a lot of fun!
AS&S has two sizes - just search for "goldberg". They're selling it about $20 cheaper than at the manufacturer's site ($129 for the large kit.) This should be affordable for schools as well as for geeks.
Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with either company. But I've been an AS&S customer since the days they were called JerryCo.
--
Unfortunately I don't know of any Web-wide RE-capable database. Here's hoping someone downthread does...
--
A .png is worth 2KB (1k words? Erm, sorry.)
But seriously... this is interesting, though maybe not interesting enough for me to want to take the time to try to duplicate the kid's theorem (without any formulas given) and draw a picture for myself. How lazy is the paper that they can't waste a column-inch (even on their Web posting) on a simple illustration or two?
--
The right ideas, the right place and the right resources are probably all required to do well in the grand dance of capitalism... having a monopoly of all the good ideas just isn't possible.
--
It's mentioned on the second page of the HowThingsWork article. Apparently the battery (chemistry unspecified) slips over the end of the phone after the primary assembly is complete.
--
Umm... Crusoe?
--
For those who don't remember, about 6 months ago the US government decided to make military-grade GPS available to civilian GPS systems. This made them much more accurate as to location, speed, etc. However they reserved the right to turn the system back down to pre-SA levels at any time, per area of the world, as National Security or government whim dictates.
Now, for all the posters who ask, what will happen if there's a building or a cloud? Will the engine cut out? I wonder about another risk; if the US decides to back off of Selective Availability, what happens to cars in motion that find themselves suddenly hundreds of meters from where they were just a moment ago, due to suddenly and purposefully inaccurate data from the birds?
Dumb computer: I'm going 500 kph! [ticket / shutdown]
Do you trust the government to notice the moment of SA shutdown and nullify the tickets? Or pay for a new car if your engine locks up?
--
I did a search on boston.com for "minesweeper" and turned up nothing. Does anyone know the exact URL for the story?
--
Start with 9GB = 9 * 1024^3 = 9663676416 Bytes
Times 9 bits per byte (8 data + 1 stop) = 86973087744 bits
Divide by 9600 bits/second = 9059696 seconds
Divide by 3600 seconds/hour = 2156 hours
Divide by 24 hours/day = 104.8 days
Add in overhead and line drops and we're talking about a little bit more than a long weekend...
--