Motion sickness can also be caused by receiving a visual cue of motion without the accompanying sensation of motion. This is why some people get nauseous when trying to play first person shooters.
An airplane ride is usually exceptionally smooth, except for periods of turbulence. If you couple that with a visual cue of motion, via a transparent floor, I would imagine you would see an increase in motion sickness.
This is highly unlikely to actually happen. As bobjakiewicz noted, it would greatly increase the number of people suffering from motion sickness and other related problems.
The only motivation I can think of for this announcement is that Airbus has somehow discovered a type of plastic that weighs less than aluminum but is strong enough to use for an aircraft body.
He went on to prove that there was no solution to the Entscheidungsproblem by first showing that the halting problem for Turing machines is undecidable: it is not possible to decide, in general, algorithmically whether a given Turing machine will ever halt.
This sounds like the kind of thing where an elected representative can really help. If the lady in question lives in the U.S., she might want to contact her U.S. Senator and her U.S. House Representative.
Most decisions of this sort are driven by laziness. We end up using the system/interface/whatever that allows us to get the most done with the least effort. Sometimes the multitude of options available in the default KDE setup allows a person to get to an application faster. Sometimes the uncluttered default GNOME setup gives you the feel of a more lightweight window manager without sacrificing most of the creature comforts. In either case, laziness is the underlying driver for our decision-making. It's the underlying driver for most software decisions.
In fact, it's one of the reasons software was invented: So I can sit on my ass all day getting paid to turn my day-dreams into reality.
I'm not sure what your teacher was showing you, but the Shuttle tiles are quite definitely fragile. See these articles: Please read what I wrote. The tile was provided by NASA PR people, not a teacher. I actually held it. You have only provided links to other people's testimony. Testimony that I obviously disagree with.
...but the Shuttle tiles are quite definitely fragile Before you make an assertion that contradicts a primary source, you should have better backup for your assertion than a random assortment of links to web pages. The web is not a reliable source.
The tiles are not incredibly delicate. They are as hard as a ceramic dinner plate but as light as a styrofoam plate.
When I was in 7th grade, some NASA PR people came to my school and did a demonstration. They took a propane blowtorch and heated a tile to the point that it glowed red. Then they walked over to a student and handed the tile to him. In the time it took to walk a few steps, the tile had cooled to room temperature.
The tile was then passed from student to student. As I said above, it was as hard as ceramic and as light as styrofoam. Even if an astronaut hit a tile deliberately with a sharp instrument, it is unlikely they could damage it.
The Achille's heel of the tile system was always the adhesive holding them to the orbiter. They seem to have dramatically improved this.
I recommend Norton Ghost. You can schedule nightly backups that kickoff automatically. I schedule my backup to start at 9:30 PM. I use the Windows scheduler to shut my machine down at 2:30 AM. That give the backup plenty of time to run, and shuts my machine down at a reasonable time. My only gripe is that Norton Ghost does not provide an option to shut your PC down after it completes the backup. I e-mailed them about the problem, but they said they had no plans to fix it.
It cost me $80 for a license, but it provides the ability to retrieve files from the backup without having to restore the backup. That feature alone has covered the cost of the license. Also, I rest easier at night knowing that I can restore my entire machine when the hard drive crashes. Notice I said "when the hard drive crashes". Hard drive crashes are inevitable, and if you are not prepared for them, you are a fool. One other note: I paid for my license out of my own pocket because my boss would only pay for an inferior solution. That is how important daily backups are. If your company will not pay for them, then at least cover your own personal situation.
My company does use a CVS repository and the company policy is daily check-ins. We are effectively using CVS as a daily backup, which it is not designed for. As a result, we have an enormous number of check-ins for every file. Trying to do a diff can become a nightmare as you step back one day at a time until you see the difference you were actually interested in. Also, because developers are forced to check in files before they are actually ready, the descriptions usually read like this, "Saving changes, WIP." Anyone who uses CVS as a backup solution is also a fool. It is a source code repository, not a backup solution. It is better than no backup at all, but most development platforms have a lot of tools and settings that cost a lot of time to duplicate from scratch. You can't check that out of CVS.
If your development platform is Linux or Unix based, you can always use the old method of dump and a cron job. If you do not know what this is, there is plenty of information in the googleplex about how to do this. I think someone recently posted an article to slashdot about it.
If you just want to do weekly snapshots, you cannot beat SystemRescueCD for price and power. We use it for switching operating system images for testing purposes. It can handle all versions of Windows and Linux (except 64-bit Fedora Core). You can use it to backup to a USB drive or to a remote system over the network. It can even backup partitions that use Logical Volume Manager if you know how to use it correctly. It also allows you to do something that very few competitors do: You can backup your master boot record separately from your partition. There are many times when having a backup copy of your MBR can save you a lot of time and hassle.
I use Linux all the time at home and at work. But I have 18 years of experience with *nix systems. When I have problems I know where to look. When I talk to casual users of Linux or people who are new to Linux, they have the same problems I have been having for the last 18 years. Do I tell them they just need to keep at it and perseverance will pay off? No, I tell them to use whatever works for them. If Windows is easier, use it. If Mac OSX is easier, use it. If DOS is easier, use it. But we don't need to create people like my brother who blames me because he can't get his wireless adapter working on his laptop with Ubuntu. How do I explain to him that his laptop might have a new custom PCI bridge that isn't supported by the stock Ubuntu kernel? Or maybe a flaky BIOS? I don't. I just let him get on with his life with something that doesn't take weeks worth of hunting the internet and rebuilding the kernel from source. The things I take for granted (familiarity breeds contempt here) are huge obstacles for people not familiar with the *nix way of accomplishing tasks. Just let them muddle through until Linux gets to the point where advocacy is no longer needed.
Slashdot Mirror
Motion sickness can also be caused by receiving a visual cue of motion without the accompanying sensation of motion. This is why some people get nauseous when trying to play first person shooters. An airplane ride is usually exceptionally smooth, except for periods of turbulence. If you couple that with a visual cue of motion, via a transparent floor, I would imagine you would see an increase in motion sickness.
This is highly unlikely to actually happen. As bobjakiewicz noted, it would greatly increase the number of people suffering from motion sickness and other related problems. The only motivation I can think of for this announcement is that Airbus has somehow discovered a type of plastic that weighs less than aluminum but is strong enough to use for an aircraft body.
From Wikipedia:
He went on to prove that there was no solution to the Entscheidungsproblem by first showing that the halting problem for Turing machines is undecidable: it is not possible to decide, in general, algorithmically whether a given Turing machine will ever halt.
A link to the Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_turing
This sounds like the kind of thing where an elected representative can really help. If the lady in question lives in the U.S., she might want to contact her U.S. Senator and her U.S. House Representative.
Most decisions of this sort are driven by laziness. We end up using the system/interface/whatever that allows us to get the most done with the least effort. Sometimes the multitude of options available in the default KDE setup allows a person to get to an application faster. Sometimes the uncluttered default GNOME setup gives you the feel of a more lightweight window manager without sacrificing most of the creature comforts. In either case, laziness is the underlying driver for our decision-making. It's the underlying driver for most software decisions.
In fact, it's one of the reasons software was invented: So I can sit on my ass all day getting paid to turn my day-dreams into reality.
...but the Shuttle tiles are quite definitely fragile Before you make an assertion that contradicts a primary source, you should have better backup for your assertion than a random assortment of links to web pages. The web is not a reliable source.The tiles are not incredibly delicate. They are as hard as a ceramic dinner plate but as light as a styrofoam plate.
When I was in 7th grade, some NASA PR people came to my school and did a demonstration. They took a propane blowtorch and heated a tile to the point that it glowed red. Then they walked over to a student and handed the tile to him. In the time it took to walk a few steps, the tile had cooled to room temperature.
The tile was then passed from student to student. As I said above, it was as hard as ceramic and as light as styrofoam. Even if an astronaut hit a tile deliberately with a sharp instrument, it is unlikely they could damage it.
The Achille's heel of the tile system was always the adhesive holding them to the orbiter. They seem to have dramatically improved this.
I recommend Norton Ghost. You can schedule nightly backups that kickoff automatically. I schedule my backup to start at 9:30 PM. I use the Windows scheduler to shut my machine down at 2:30 AM. That give the backup plenty of time to run, and shuts my machine down at a reasonable time. My only gripe is that Norton Ghost does not provide an option to shut your PC down after it completes the backup. I e-mailed them about the problem, but they said they had no plans to fix it.
It cost me $80 for a license, but it provides the ability to retrieve files from the backup without having to restore the backup. That feature alone has covered the cost of the license. Also, I rest easier at night knowing that I can restore my entire machine when the hard drive crashes. Notice I said "when the hard drive crashes". Hard drive crashes are inevitable, and if you are not prepared for them, you are a fool. One other note: I paid for my license out of my own pocket because my boss would only pay for an inferior solution. That is how important daily backups are. If your company will not pay for them, then at least cover your own personal situation.
My company does use a CVS repository and the company policy is daily check-ins. We are effectively using CVS as a daily backup, which it is not designed for. As a result, we have an enormous number of check-ins for every file. Trying to do a diff can become a nightmare as you step back one day at a time until you see the difference you were actually interested in. Also, because developers are forced to check in files before they are actually ready, the descriptions usually read like this, "Saving changes, WIP." Anyone who uses CVS as a backup solution is also a fool. It is a source code repository, not a backup solution. It is better than no backup at all, but most development platforms have a lot of tools and settings that cost a lot of time to duplicate from scratch. You can't check that out of CVS.
If your development platform is Linux or Unix based, you can always use the old method of dump and a cron job. If you do not know what this is, there is plenty of information in the googleplex about how to do this. I think someone recently posted an article to slashdot about it.
If you just want to do weekly snapshots, you cannot beat SystemRescueCD for price and power. We use it for switching operating system images for testing purposes. It can handle all versions of Windows and Linux (except 64-bit Fedora Core). You can use it to backup to a USB drive or to a remote system over the network. It can even backup partitions that use Logical Volume Manager if you know how to use it correctly. It also allows you to do something that very few competitors do: You can backup your master boot record separately from your partition. There are many times when having a backup copy of your MBR can save you a lot of time and hassle.
Captcha: rerouted
I use Linux all the time at home and at work. But I have 18 years of experience with *nix systems. When I have problems I know where to look. When I talk to casual users of Linux or people who are new to Linux, they have the same problems I have been having for the last 18 years. Do I tell them they just need to keep at it and perseverance will pay off? No, I tell them to use whatever works for them. If Windows is easier, use it. If Mac OSX is easier, use it. If DOS is easier, use it. But we don't need to create people like my brother who blames me because he can't get his wireless adapter working on his laptop with Ubuntu. How do I explain to him that his laptop might have a new custom PCI bridge that isn't supported by the stock Ubuntu kernel? Or maybe a flaky BIOS? I don't. I just let him get on with his life with something that doesn't take weeks worth of hunting the internet and rebuilding the kernel from source. The things I take for granted (familiarity breeds contempt here) are huge obstacles for people not familiar with the *nix way of accomplishing tasks. Just let them muddle through until Linux gets to the point where advocacy is no longer needed.