a good starting point for the "opposing theory" would be Bjorn Lomborg's The Skeptical Environmentalist Lomborg has softened in the meantime too. He doesn't deny global warming at all any more or that it's most man-made, he argues about what and how much we can/should do about it. I used to view him as yet another BSer, but he makes a lot of sense now. The data is on the table, what needs to be done should be based on economic reasoning now. The issue is, there's a conflict of interest between someone living e.g. in L.A. and somebody living in Bangladesh. Or the Florida keys for that matter.
>Global warming is probably the most controversial scientific subject today
No. It's not. For scientists, anyway. It is only in the media. And, FWIW, only in the US. Everywhere else in the world people who deny global warming are viewed as nutcases. See a pattern here? I do. Remember the USCD study by Naomi Oreskes in 2004? There were exactly 0 papers in peer reviewed journals over 10 years that did not accept global warming as a fact. All that scientists quibble over is how much of it is man-made, and the consensus is somewhere over 50%. See e.g. this National Geographic article. The case is closed. Kinda like scientists vs. the bible 300 years ago, and some *still* argue about that one.
sooner or later OSS HAS to cost you less And once you run into the limits of one tool, you have documentation and interfaces so you can extend it, or work around limitations. Yeah I know, this may entail going back to the source. Or you can just go to a different tool because you have compatible or documented file formats. But with closed tools you're more or less stuck. I've seen way too many cases where Excel refused to jump through hoops, at least without some serious coding. Unfortunately, around here Excel is all people know. Have tou ever heard someone in the next office over going click, click, clock rapidly about 50 times? I'll bet you they were using Excel. If all you have is a hammer, you don't know what you could do with a Swiss chainsaw.
You mean we actually get to fire live ammo on the MPAA/RIAA lawyers? No, only the poor sods who get sent out to do the dirty work for the elite. Sorry.
use a copy of the DVD I put onto my laptop hard disk Criminal. You must have used some variant of DeCSS, so you're eligible to drawing and quartering, or maybe burning on the stake.
This ship sounds suspiciously like the Phoenix from Larry Niven's Fallen Angels. No surprise. Larry Niven is part of the Citizen's Advisory Council, who pushed for DC-X style VTVL for a long time. See here.
Any job losses from outsourcing are made up by the hordes of quality people you need to keep your outside vendors under control. It still doesn't work out, you pull the outsourced labor back in and need the quality people to fix the mess. Long term it probably leads to a net gain of jobs. </cynicism>
I read somewhere (can't remember where) that they're using H2O2 monopropellant for the demo and will use H2O2/kerosene for the real thing. That's why you only see steam in the demo.
In architecture, the transition from the artistic to the engineering phase is well defined because the engineering discipline uses a mature restricted set of components. E.g. the 2x4. Now imagine if one of your suppliers came in and told you or your management or even your customer "look, we have this great new design, a 2x3.8! It'll save you 5% in material, and through our new and improved design, we have the same strength as the old stuff! However, you can drill holes only in specific locations, and only when the moon is half full."
Components and subsystems (middleware, runtime, OS, firmware...) du jour that aren't fully specified is where the difference lies. If we used the same set of components that we learned in college we would be totally confident in applying them after a couple of years (heck I can do POSIX C in my sleep but who wants that these days?) But the lifetime of a specific SW/FW revision is generally measured in months, and in a few years you are through a number of major revisions or on a completely different project or product. If our product life cycles were measured in decades the disciplines could settle down to "real" engineering.
Good software takes time to develop. ... during which the specifications usually change, or holes are found in the specs. It's chasing a moving target that makes it hard. Interfacing with other [sub]systems that themselves aren't final/stable. Trying to nail Jell-O, basically. Try to build a bridge out of Jell-O!
Subject says it all. What else but the angular momentum of the original star determines the pulsar's rotation rate? The supernova process can only determine how that angular momentum is divided between the pulsar and the ejected mass. So does this new mechanism cause mass to be ejected off-center? The news release doesn't say much, unfortunately.
Once the "first chip" is made the margin cost is VERY low. ... assuming you get decent yield. I once read that high single digit percentages were considered good when starting up a new process technology. With smaller feature sizes this can only get worse.
Every bit cell on a Flash or EEPROM is a capacitor. Since it doesn't have remanence in spaces that may not see a flux change and the possibility of offtrack writes like a hard drive, overwriting with random data is unnecessary - better write 0x00, then 0xff, a few times.
Writing a word or block in one of those devices means: - Erase the word/line/block to 0xff if necessary (i.e. if there are bits that need to be flipped to 1) - For each bit that is to be set to 0, -- bang on it with a pulse until it turns 0 -- bang on it a little more to make sure the bit sticks
So, by writing all 0xff every cell gets erased, and you could theoretically argue that with changing device characteristics (aging), the voltage level of older 1's could be different than what you just wrote. Same thing for 0's, but if you do this twice or so all traces of old data should be gone. There's no nooks and crannies like on a disk platter, only an array of capacitors.
Slashdot Mirror
From The Fortress Language Specification, version 1.0alpha:
component HelloWorld
export Executable
run(args) = print "Hello, world!"
end
>Global warming is probably the most controversial scientific subject today
No. It's not. For scientists, anyway. It is only in the media. And, FWIW, only in the US. Everywhere else in the world people who deny global warming are viewed as nutcases. See a pattern here? I do.
Remember the USCD study by Naomi Oreskes in 2004? There were exactly 0 papers in peer reviewed journals over 10 years that did not accept global warming as a fact. All that scientists quibble over is how much of it is man-made, and the consensus is somewhere over 50%.
See e.g. this National Geographic article.
The case is closed. Kinda like scientists vs. the bible 300 years ago, and some *still* argue about that one.
But with closed tools you're more or less stuck. I've seen way too many cases where Excel refused to jump through hoops, at least without some serious coding. Unfortunately, around here Excel is all people know. Have tou ever heard someone in the next office over going click, click, clock rapidly about 50 times? I'll bet you they were using Excel.
If all you have is a hammer, you don't know what you could do with a Swiss chainsaw.
*Much* better. But interesting to see how not even NASA folks can spell.
See Sperm Wars by Robin Baker. Better yet, read it. Mind boggling stuff. Review here.
Any job losses from outsourcing are made up by the hordes of quality people you need to keep your outside vendors under control. It still doesn't work out, you pull the outsourced labor back in and need the quality people to fix the mess. Long term it probably leads to a net gain of jobs.
</cynicism>
I read somewhere (can't remember where) that they're using H2O2 monopropellant for the demo and will use H2O2/kerosene for the real thing. That's why you only see steam in the demo.
Jerry Pournelle has some data that make it sound feasible.
A mass ratio of 17 (5.9% payload) with RL-10 engines doesn't sound too bad for a start.
In architecture, the transition from the artistic to the engineering phase is well defined because the engineering discipline uses a mature restricted set of components. E.g. the 2x4. Now imagine if one of your suppliers came in and told you or your management or even your customer "look, we have this great new design, a 2x3.8! It'll save you 5% in material, and through our new and improved design, we have the same strength as the old stuff! However, you can drill holes only in specific locations, and only when the moon is half full."
Components and subsystems (middleware, runtime, OS, firmware...) du jour that aren't fully specified is where the difference lies. If we used the same set of components that we learned in college we would be totally confident in applying them after a couple of years (heck I can do POSIX C in my sleep but who wants that these days?) But the lifetime of a specific SW/FW revision is generally measured in months, and in a few years you are through a number of major revisions or on a completely different project or product. If our product life cycles were measured in decades the disciplines could settle down to "real" engineering.
It's basically Moore's law at fault.
Kudos.
Subject says it all. What else but the angular momentum of the original star determines the pulsar's rotation rate? The supernova process can only determine how that angular momentum is divided between the pulsar and the ejected mass. So does this new mechanism cause mass to be ejected off-center? The news release doesn't say much, unfortunately.
Sounds exactly like Philip Morris telling you that smoking is bad for you.
At least one O'Hare controller, union official Craig Burzych, was amused by it all.
"To fly 7 million light years to O'Hare and then have to turn around and go home because your gate was occupied is simply unacceptable," he said.
Every bit cell on a Flash or EEPROM is a capacitor. Since it doesn't have remanence in spaces that may not see a flux change and the possibility of offtrack writes like a hard drive, overwriting with random data is unnecessary - better write 0x00, then 0xff, a few times.
Writing a word or block in one of those devices means:
- Erase the word/line/block to 0xff if necessary (i.e. if there are bits that need to be flipped to 1)
- For each bit that is to be set to 0,
-- bang on it with a pulse until it turns 0
-- bang on it a little more to make sure the bit sticks
So, by writing all 0xff every cell gets erased, and you could theoretically argue that with changing device characteristics (aging), the voltage level of older 1's could be different than what you just wrote. Same thing for 0's, but if you do this twice or so all traces of old data should be gone. There's no nooks and crannies like on a disk platter, only an array of capacitors.
"Nothing for you to see here. Please move along."
How appropriate.
That should be "We're too ignorant to support Linux in a legal way."