This page describes a car driven by a Linux computer. It's called the ARGO project, and it's in Italy. It's driven a long distance around Italy in what they called the "MilleMiglia in Automatico Tour".
1) I'm not assuming anything. It is a *fact* that the claims would violate well established observation. It is a *fact* that NASA cannot replicate the results. That's hardly an assumption. It's a statement with a hell of a lot of support.
2) I'm not a fool if I discount the possibility and I am wrong. That's just called being wrong, not being a fool.
3) You have no idea what an open mind is. An open mind isn't like an apartment where any old idea can come in, use the toilet, make a sandwich, and sit in front of the TV in it's jockey shorts. An open mind a) criticizes and scrutinizes everything idea presented. It assumes nothing, and demands evidence for everything. b) accepts sufficient evidence when it is presented. c) changes opinion based on evidence.
I have a perfectly open mind. Show me the evidence and I will admit that anti-grav works. No problem.
A closed mind would be one that insists that anti-grav is bogus, even as he is riding in a flying saucer on his way to the grocery store.
Damn, I've got to write an article about this and put it someplace prominent. It seems that hardly anyone knows what an open mind is these days. Everyone seems to think that an open mind should welcome trash ideas without questioning them. Sheesh!
The iridium flares were never a real threat to astronomy. They happen at predictable times, and there just weren't many satellites up there.
More of a threat to optical telescopes is orbiting stuff in general. I've got a small telescope, and usually once or twice a night I will actually see a very dim satellite cross my field of view. My telescope has a very large field of view, but satellite trails are common enough in large professional instruments that a good number of otherwise good astrophotographs are ruined by them.
The big hazard from Iridium in particular is that the radio emissions are very close to the frequency of the hydroxyl group (HO) which is an important frequency for radio astronomy. These radio emissions have nothing at all to do with the iridium flare phenomenon.
I caution *you*: strange analogies can lead you astray. I have no idea what a correlation with the justice system has to do with anything.
I assume nothing. If you claim something and show me no evidence, I am a fool to believe it.
If I know for a fact that NASA has been trying to replicate the experiment for a year and has failed, then I am well justified to consider that as support for my position that anti-gravity is a sick joke, and those that are still willing to consider the possibility that a superconducting rotating disk has anti-grav powers are completely ignorant.
I do agree with you about keeping theologians out of science.
1) inertia -- Einstein didn't do away with inertia.
2) F=ma -- This is the *core* of much of Einstein's work. This relationship still applies. As you get closer to the speed of light, m increases in value. That was Einstein's contribution. The formula is still 100% valid.
3) equal and opposite reaction --- are you arguing that rocketry doesn't work anymore?
Go away with this nonsense about Newton being wrong. He was right, and his theories were *expanded* upon by Einstein. If you claim that his theory was replaced by relativity, you are mistaken.
You need to bone up on Newton's laws of motion. If those are wrong, then you need to explain how we can drop kick a space probe all the way to Saturn. The fact that those laws work pretty well for that sort of thing is pretty good evidence that they can't be too far off the mark. If you understood that, then you'd see why producing a force using inertia is a silly statement. You're not going to net any magical unaccounted force.
This sort of book rubs me the wrong way. I know a lot about religion, and I also know a lot about science. I'm learning more just as fast as I can read books on either subject. I'll probably buy this book, because it sounds interesting.
Anyway, back to my point: this sort of book rubs me the wrong way. I don't think there's any easy way to reconcile religion and science. There's just too many things which we are pretty certain of through the scientific method which don't jive with any religion's view of the world. For example, many people will try to reconcile the creation account in Genesis with evolution, noting that generally simpler things are claimed to have been "created" before more complex things, with man being created last. Well, first you have to pick which creation account you want to believe (there are two different ones in Genesis). Then you have to ignore such things as multiple creations of light, and the out of order creation of plants on the land. The fact of the fossil record says one thing, and the Bible says another thing.
The note about the huge mystery of God underlying everything is really troubling to me as well. If you break down this universe into smaller and smaller pieces, does one find god underlying everything? Nope! What you do find is just a bunch of teensy stupid particles, behaving randomly. The description of jehovah is a little bit different than that. One of those things is fact; the other is something that is read out of a book without any factual support.
The term for this is the "god of the gaps". Science can describe a lot of things. There is a tendancy to attribute everything that is unexplained as the work or existence of god. The trouble is that over time, science expands knowlege, so the god that is stuck in betwen (in the gap) gets smaller and smaller.
The 21st century is going to be a very bad time for religion indeed.
Ad hominem, straw man, non-sequitur, improper burden of proof: bzzzzzt! You fail, try again.
You make the claim, you provide the proof.
If you provide proof, I will believe. Until then, anti-grav is BOGUS and those who suggest it are CRANKS.
I'm not being harsh, this is just how science works. My demands are reasonable, and just a simple demonstration is all it would take and I would change my mind completely, without hesitation.
You ask a really good question, so I'm going to give you a really good answer:
If *you* make an extreme claim then *I* demand evidence until *I* am satisfied. The person making the claim has the burden of proof which means that they have to keep providing evidence until the critics are satisfied.
Hopefully your critics are open minded. Open minded does not mean that a person will accept any old thing that comes along. Open minded does not mean that a person has to say that "anything's possible, so don't shoot the idea down yet."
Open minded people shoot down ideas just like closed minded people. Open minded people criticise ideas too. Open minded people demand a lot of evidence. The difference is that an open minded person will change their opinion once sufficient evidence is given.
Hey! What a bargain! You got two definitions when you only asked for one. Sorry about that...
You're also betraying a lack of grounding in the scientific method. Not to be harsh here, but the anti-gravity bogosity doesn't go against just the theories that are accepted in the year 2000, it also goes against the FACT that gravity works on objects with mass.
Only someone with a really poor understanding of physics would believe the old canard that a gyroscope (even a supercold superconduction gyroscope) would lose weight.
1) mass is important, weight is not. When I am jumping, I also lose ALL of my weight momentarily, but none of my mass. Too bad for the jumping diet program...:-) 2) since the guy is measuring weight, then only a dork would accept the claim and start funding an anti-grav program. Why not fund a maglev program instead? It's a much more likely explanation of what's happening. 3) I don't know if this particular thing is fact right now but Einstein's theories predict that a gyroscope actually gets MORE massive and therefore heavier when it spins really fast. Where's the theoretical work that tries to explain this in light of the dubious experiment?
Methinks you're a bit too credulous. The proper attitude to take is to first be skeptical, giving no benefits of doubt. That's a hell of a fish story the guy is telling, and I want to see that fish for myself.
I am completely justfied in proclaiming at this point that the experiments are CRAP and they should be completely IGNORED. Of course, real evidence would change the situation quite a bit!
The article may imply that they are wasting money because they don't know what they are doing, but it also states flat out that anti-gravity would violate laws of physics, and that the higher ups have puny brains when it comes to physics.
Take a look at the sci.skeptic FAQ where all this nonsense is harshly treated. The relevant section of the FAQ is section 8.8 - almost at the bottom of the page.
Rambus is a company that makes its money off licensing intellectual property. Wall Street seems to like this sort of thing, because the stock keeps going up.
IP is anathema to many if not most open source fans, so that really puts us at odds with wall street. I think it comes down to ethics: we got 'em and wall street don't. Or maybe the ethics of wall street are so obfuscated that hackers can't recognize them as ethics... Someday this kind of nonsense will stop. We'll change the patent system. We'll change the people in companies. Eventually most companies will have to become at least somewhat friendly to open source and open standards. But, the driver behind all of it is the oligarchy. Most of the rules that we live by aren't in the constitution, they are in the federal and state codes, and in the body of law precident. Those affect us daily more than the constitution does. We're really in a giant power struggle here, and our values are openness and freedom. The heads of companies that make up rules to hurt their enemies are playing a losing game in my opinion. That goofy word "coopetition" is a new business model that hasn't trickled down very far yet. The interaction that we see between Red Hat and others such as Mandrake is how things will be resolved in the future.
I predict that these silly lawsuits will rise for a few years, peak out, then decline as companies open their eyes to a better way of doing business.
Coins definitely are good, but don't forget about mint condition paper money. How many of us have held a mint condition dollar bill from the Civil War (a lot of money at that time was counterfeit). Money is high quality paper, so a few dollar bills would last a very long time.
You may want to write two separate letters to the future: one, a personal one, with whatever you want to say. The second one should have some factual stuff - number one would be the date, and some nice information about each of the items you put in the box. Try to imagine something neat about each item that people of the future just might not know. For example, with the dollar bills, tell them to look for the little bird above the "1" in the upper right corner. Who's going to know that in the year 2100? That sort of information is what will make your capsule valuable. Without it, it's just a box of old junk.
Make sure everything is well protected. Plastic is a good way to protect things, but you need to think about rodents too.
I'd use some kind of aluminum box on the outside (steel will rust away) and a plastic box on the inside to keep water out (rats would eat that if they can get to it). Tupperware would probably be OK I guess.
Throw in a few of those silica gel things for good measure before you seal the thing up tight. Gotta think like an archivist here. I bet the National Archives has some sort of gubment publication they would send you with some tips on how to make a time capsule.
That's a great idea by the way. It sure would be sweet to be there to see the next owners of the house discover it.
Oh, another thing: Photographs won't do well unless they are black and white. Color dyes are unstable. And if you're worried about paper, you can photocopy whatever you have onto acid free paper. Remember that if you have all acid free paper, but you stick one newspaper article in there on newrag, the acid in that newsrag will eventually wreck everything else in the box. Don't put a single thing in there unless you're sure it's acid free. If in doubt, photocopy it first!
Penrose applies his arguments to infinite turing machines. The problems is that you can't solve the halting problem on one of those.
Now, give me a finite turing machine, and I'll write you a program that will tell you every single time if the program will stop. It's simple: if you've got a finite machine, then there's always a bigger machine which can simulate the smaller machine. You can essentially run any program in a debugger and either look for the halting condition, or you can look for a repetition of a previously entered machine state.
Since everything in the world is a finite turing machine, and Penrose talks about infinite turing machines, his arguments don't really apply as well as he thinks they do.
I don't think ditching the satellites is such a huge waste, and for a lot of reasons they probably should be dumped now.
If anyone else takes the network over, what assurance do we have that they will deorbit them properly? Most likely, the satellites would fail and be left in their orbits creating a future hazard.
The Iridium network isn't a huge waste, because the engineers who built them have taken home paychecks and eaten the groceries for years now. As Chris Rock said, any corporate mission statement is equivalent to "all babies must eat." Those babies would have had to eat anyway...
Sure, that would be OK. A robot that looks like a Centaur (half man, half horse) would still be more useful in very difficult terrain that anything with wheels or tracks.
Point one: if the advantages of bipeds were offset by the complexity, then bipeds would not have evolved. The fact is that bipedal locomotion is a very useful thing, and it allows your hands to hold a nice big weapon
Point two: tracked and wheeled vehicles already exist. I would not want to be in one of those, fighting men on foot in rocky/hilly terrain. A soldier on his feet is more survivable than a wheeled robot when the slope gets steeper than 10% (or maybe less) and there's rocks and gullys all over.
Right now, I think the best application for a combat bot is in the air. Even for infantry type work, small vehicles with weapons that can fly might be much much more effective than something that has to navigate terrai.
-Of course, if you have 50 companies on your resume, and you've never worked for one place for more than a year, you're much more likely to get passed over for FT employment should you ever decide you want to stop contracting...
Not really. Working for a lot of places doing lots of things means that I can do a lot of things. I've hit all the hot technologies in the past three years at various jobs. Basically if anyone calls looking for a buzzword technology, I am able to do the job, as long as it's not a Microsoft shop. Also, if someone was under the impression that I'm a bad employee for switching jobs, they should bear in mind that through the entire thing I probably only worked for a single consulting company. If they don't want to hire me, then I'll scratch them off the list and consider the other 150 companies on my list.:-)
You mention consulting companies, and by that I guess you mean body shops...
I work for Ciber, which you could probably consider to be a body shop. They have me working at IBM on a web site development project. I've got a Linux box on my desk, and another one in the machine room. I do Java development mostly, but I've done some TCL too. I work a lot of hours, and because of that I'm going to make much more than Linus Torvalds does this year (I read that he makes $120,000).
I countermand your note. PREFER consulting shops to permanent employment.
-You'll get to do many more things in your career. -You'll work with many more interesting people in your career. -You'll get to stack your resume with lots of company names: I've personally worked with State of Michigan, Ford, Chrysler, American Express, IBM, Motorola, Dept. of Defense, and Avnet. -You'll get paid overtime. -You'll get to pick and choose the projects you want to work on. -You won't have to pretend that the old social contract is still in force, and consequently you won't be surprised when your permanent employer decides to fire you at age 53, rather than let you retire and have to pay you a pension. -You'll still get stock purchase plans, 401K's, health and dental insurance, and 3 weeks of vacation a year.
Seeing the code is but the first step. Did you actually *compile* the code and then execute it? Microsoft has given lip service to opening source code before, but they've never promised to release all the source to a working version. Unless you can take the source, compile it, and produce a working executable, then there's no point.
Glass will indeed flow. For typical window glass held in a vertical position, it will gain a 5% increase in width at the bottom after 10 million years. This is a *very* slow flow.
The reason that old glass looks funky has to do with the manufacturing process. Old glass used to be made by hand. The glass blower would blow a ball of glass into a cylindrical mold. After the glass was cold, it would be removed from the mold, and scored lengthwise. After another heating, the cylinder of glass would be broken along the score line and unrolled to form a flat sheet. That flat sheet would be "ironed" smooth, and you could get an acceptable window pane that way.
New glass is made by floating a layer of glass on top of molten tin. The glass solidifies on top of the tin and is very very flat.
There are companies that still make glass the old way, because some people like the flawed appearance. They expect to have windows like that on their old victorian houses. The White House made a large order recently to one of those companies. They replaced a large number of their old windows with glass that looks antique.
You should remember that security by obscurity is no security at all.
If you're going to use steganography, make sure that you're hiding *encrypted* data away.
The recent shouting in England was all about the courts forcing you to turn over the keys if they find encrypted data in an investigation. If you don't have the key, or you lost the key, off to the pokey you go.
Steganography when it's done correctly will most likely prevent the authorities from becoming aware of encrypted data at all. But if they do manage to discover it, another layer of encryption will stop them cold.
Furthermore, encrypted data should look statistically random. They'll have a hell of a time proving that they've got encrypted data and not some kind of random figment of their imagination.
Vegetarian diet and cold weather killed him? Hmmmm. I would have thought it was a combination of crappy medicine and microscopic life forms. Remember folks, most of us are alive today for one reason: we figured out how to battle the bugs. Poor Ramanujan lived before all that. Sorry, rant off.
The real reason that I'm posting is that Ramanujan was a VERY SERIOUS LOVER OF PI. He memorized many many digits, and he invented the Ramanujan series which calculates PI pretty quickly.
And since it was 3.14 March 14th yesterday, that seems appropriate.
Slashdot Mirror
This page describes a car driven by a Linux computer. It's called the ARGO project, and it's in Italy. It's driven a long distance around Italy in what they called the "MilleMiglia in Automatico Tour".
1) I'm not assuming anything. It is a *fact* that the claims would violate well established observation. It is a *fact* that NASA cannot replicate the results. That's hardly an assumption. It's a statement with a hell of a lot of support.
2) I'm not a fool if I discount the possibility and I am wrong. That's just called being wrong, not being a fool.
3) You have no idea what an open mind is. An open mind isn't like an apartment where any old idea can come in, use the toilet, make a sandwich, and sit in front of the TV in it's jockey shorts. An open mind a) criticizes and scrutinizes everything idea presented. It assumes nothing, and demands evidence for everything. b) accepts sufficient evidence when it is presented. c) changes opinion based on evidence.
I have a perfectly open mind. Show me the evidence and I will admit that anti-grav works. No problem.
A closed mind would be one that insists that anti-grav is bogus, even as he is riding in a flying saucer on his way to the grocery store.
Damn, I've got to write an article about this and put it someplace prominent. It seems that hardly anyone knows what an open mind is these days. Everyone seems to think that an open mind should welcome trash ideas without questioning them. Sheesh!
The iridium flares were never a real threat to astronomy. They happen at predictable times, and there just weren't many satellites up there.
More of a threat to optical telescopes is orbiting stuff in general. I've got a small telescope, and usually once or twice a night I will actually see a very dim satellite cross my field of view. My telescope has a very large field of view, but satellite trails are common enough in large professional instruments that a good number of otherwise good astrophotographs are ruined by them.
The big hazard from Iridium in particular is that the radio emissions are very close to the frequency of the hydroxyl group (HO) which is an important frequency for radio astronomy. These radio emissions have nothing at all to do with the iridium flare phenomenon.
I caution *you*: strange analogies can lead you astray. I have no idea what a correlation with the justice system has to do with anything.
I assume nothing. If you claim something and show me no evidence, I am a fool to believe it.
If I know for a fact that NASA has been trying to replicate the experiment for a year and has failed, then I am well justified to consider that as support for my position that anti-gravity is a sick joke, and those that are still willing to consider the possibility that a superconducting rotating disk has anti-grav powers are completely ignorant.
I do agree with you about keeping theologians out of science.
>Newton's laws break
Which one breaks?
1) inertia -- Einstein didn't do away with inertia.
2) F=ma -- This is the *core* of much of Einstein's work. This relationship still applies. As you get closer to the speed of light, m increases in value. That was Einstein's contribution. The formula is still 100% valid.
3) equal and opposite reaction --- are you arguing that rocketry doesn't work anymore?
Go away with this nonsense about Newton being wrong. He was right, and his theories were *expanded* upon by Einstein. If you claim that his theory was replaced by relativity, you are mistaken.
You need to bone up on Newton's laws of motion. If those are wrong, then you need to explain how we can drop kick a space probe all the way to Saturn. The fact that those laws work pretty well for that sort of thing is pretty good evidence that they can't be too far off the mark. If you understood that, then you'd see why producing a force using inertia is a silly statement. You're not going to net any magical unaccounted force.
This sort of book rubs me the wrong way. I know a lot about religion, and I also know a lot about science. I'm learning more just as fast as I can read books on either subject. I'll probably buy this book, because it sounds interesting.
Anyway, back to my point: this sort of book rubs me the wrong way. I don't think there's any easy way to reconcile religion and science. There's just too many things which we are pretty certain of through the scientific method which don't jive with any religion's view of the world. For example, many people will try to reconcile the creation account in Genesis with evolution, noting that generally simpler things are claimed to have been "created" before more complex things, with man being created last. Well, first you have to pick which creation account you want to believe (there are two different ones in Genesis). Then you have to ignore such things as multiple creations of light, and the out of order creation of plants on the land. The fact of the fossil record says one thing, and the Bible says another thing.
The note about the huge mystery of God underlying everything is really troubling to me as well. If you break down this universe into smaller and smaller pieces, does one find god underlying everything? Nope! What you do find is just a bunch of teensy stupid particles, behaving randomly. The description of jehovah is a little bit different than that. One of those things is fact; the other is something that is read out of a book without any factual support.
The term for this is the "god of the gaps". Science can describe a lot of things. There is a tendancy to attribute everything that is unexplained as the work or existence of god. The trouble is that over time, science expands knowlege, so the god that is stuck in betwen (in the gap) gets smaller and smaller.
The 21st century is going to be a very bad time for religion indeed.
Ad hominem, straw man, non-sequitur, improper burden of proof: bzzzzzt! You fail, try again.
You make the claim, you provide the proof.
If you provide proof, I will believe. Until then, anti-grav is BOGUS and those who suggest it are CRANKS.
I'm not being harsh, this is just how science works. My demands are reasonable, and just a simple demonstration is all it would take and I would change my mind completely, without hesitation.
You ask a really good question, so I'm going to give you a really good answer:
If *you* make an extreme claim then *I* demand evidence until *I* am satisfied. The person making the claim has the burden of proof which means that they have to keep providing evidence until the critics are satisfied.
Hopefully your critics are open minded. Open minded does not mean that a person will accept any old thing that comes along. Open minded does not mean that a person has to say that "anything's possible, so don't shoot the idea down yet."
Open minded people shoot down ideas just like closed minded people. Open minded people criticise ideas too. Open minded people demand a lot of evidence. The difference is that an open minded person will change their opinion once sufficient evidence is given.
Hey! What a bargain! You got two definitions when you only asked for one. Sorry about that...
You're also betraying a lack of grounding in the scientific method. Not to be harsh here, but the anti-gravity bogosity doesn't go against just the theories that are accepted in the year 2000, it also goes against the FACT that gravity works on objects with mass.
:-)
Only someone with a really poor understanding of physics would believe the old canard that a gyroscope (even a supercold superconduction gyroscope) would lose weight.
1) mass is important, weight is not. When I am jumping, I also lose ALL of my weight momentarily, but none of my mass. Too bad for the jumping diet program...
2) since the guy is measuring weight, then only a dork would accept the claim and start funding an anti-grav program. Why not fund a maglev program instead? It's a much more likely explanation of what's happening.
3) I don't know if this particular thing is fact right now but Einstein's theories predict that a gyroscope actually gets MORE massive and therefore heavier when it spins really fast. Where's the theoretical work that tries to explain this in light of the dubious experiment?
Methinks you're a bit too credulous. The proper attitude to take is to first be skeptical, giving no benefits of doubt. That's a hell of a fish story the guy is telling, and I want to see that fish for myself.
I am completely justfied in proclaiming at this point that the experiments are CRAP and they should be completely IGNORED. Of course, real evidence would change the situation quite a bit!
The article may imply that they are wasting money because they don't know what they are doing, but it also states flat out that anti-gravity would violate laws of physics, and that the higher ups have puny brains when it comes to physics.
Take a look at the sci.skeptic FAQ where all this nonsense is harshly treated. The relevant section of the FAQ is section 8.8 - almost at the bottom of the page.
You can probably find other mirrors of the FAQ.
Rambus is a company that makes its money off licensing intellectual property. Wall Street seems to like this sort of thing, because the stock keeps going up.
IP is anathema to many if not most open source fans, so that really puts us at odds with wall street. I think it comes down to ethics: we got 'em and wall street don't. Or maybe the ethics of wall street are so obfuscated that hackers can't recognize them as ethics... Someday this kind of nonsense will stop. We'll change the patent system. We'll change the people in companies. Eventually most companies will have to become at least somewhat friendly to open source and open standards. But, the driver behind all of it is the oligarchy. Most of the rules that we live by aren't in the constitution, they are in the federal and state codes, and in the body of law precident. Those affect us daily more than the constitution does. We're really in a giant power struggle here, and our values are openness and freedom. The heads of companies that make up rules to hurt their enemies are playing a losing game in my opinion. That goofy word "coopetition" is a new business model that hasn't trickled down very far yet. The interaction that we see between Red Hat and others such as Mandrake is how things will be resolved in the future.
I predict that these silly lawsuits will rise for a few years, peak out, then decline as companies open their eyes to a better way of doing business.
Coins definitely are good, but don't forget about mint condition paper money. How many of us have held a mint condition dollar bill from the Civil War (a lot of money at that time was counterfeit). Money is high quality paper, so a few dollar bills would last a very long time.
You may want to write two separate letters to the future: one, a personal one, with whatever you want to say. The second one should have some factual stuff - number one would be the date, and some nice information about each of the items you put in the box. Try to imagine something neat about each item that people of the future just might not know. For example, with the dollar bills, tell them to look for the little bird above the "1" in the upper right corner. Who's going to know that in the year 2100? That sort of information is what will make your capsule valuable. Without it, it's just a box of old junk.
Make sure everything is well protected. Plastic is a good way to protect things, but you need to think about rodents too.
I'd use some kind of aluminum box on the outside (steel will rust away) and a plastic box on the inside to keep water out (rats would eat that if they can get to it). Tupperware would probably be OK I guess.
Throw in a few of those silica gel things for good measure before you seal the thing up tight. Gotta think like an archivist here. I bet the National Archives has some sort of gubment publication they would send you with some tips on how to make a time capsule.
That's a great idea by the way. It sure would be sweet to be there to see the next owners of the house discover it.
Oh, another thing: Photographs won't do well unless they are black and white. Color dyes are unstable. And if you're worried about paper, you can photocopy whatever you have onto acid free paper. Remember that if you have all acid free paper, but you stick one newspaper article in there on newrag, the acid in that newsrag will eventually wreck everything else in the box. Don't put a single thing in there unless you're sure it's acid free. If in doubt, photocopy it first!
Penrose applies his arguments to infinite turing machines. The problems is that you can't solve the halting problem on one of those.
Now, give me a finite turing machine, and I'll write you a program that will tell you every single time if the program will stop. It's simple: if you've got a finite machine, then there's always a bigger machine which can simulate the smaller machine. You can essentially run any program in a debugger and either look for the halting condition, or you can look for a repetition of a previously entered machine state.
Since everything in the world is a finite turing machine, and Penrose talks about infinite turing machines, his arguments don't really apply as well as he thinks they do.
I don't think ditching the satellites is such a huge waste, and for a lot of reasons they probably should be dumped now.
If anyone else takes the network over, what assurance do we have that they will deorbit them properly? Most likely, the satellites would fail and be left in their orbits creating a future hazard.
The Iridium network isn't a huge waste, because the engineers who built them have taken home paychecks and eaten the groceries for years now. As Chris Rock said, any corporate mission statement is equivalent to "all babies must eat." Those babies would have had to eat anyway...
Sure, that would be OK. A robot that looks like a Centaur (half man, half horse) would still be more useful in very difficult terrain that anything with wheels or tracks.
Point one: if the advantages of bipeds were offset by the complexity, then bipeds would not have evolved. The fact is that bipedal locomotion is a very useful thing, and it allows your hands to hold a nice big weapon
Point two: tracked and wheeled vehicles already exist. I would not want to be in one of those, fighting men on foot in rocky/hilly terrain. A soldier on his feet is more survivable than a wheeled robot when the slope gets steeper than 10% (or maybe less) and there's rocks and gullys all over.
Right now, I think the best application for a combat bot is in the air. Even for infantry type work, small vehicles with weapons that can fly might be much much more effective than something that has to navigate terrai.
This reminds me of a movie...
Lieutenant Saavik!
Quick! Punch up the Reliant's command console...
Now, order the Reliant to lower it's shields.
FIRE!!!!!! (kaboom)
You did it, Captian!
I DID NOTHING! All I did was get caught with my britches down.
Oog, you're right. But have you seen the curve on Caldera's stock price? It's completely flat!
-Of course, if you have 50 companies on your resume, and you've never worked for one place for more than a year, you're much more likely to get passed over for FT employment should you ever decide you want to stop contracting...
:-)
Not really. Working for a lot of places doing lots of things means that I can do a lot of things. I've hit all the hot technologies in the past three years at various jobs. Basically if anyone calls looking for a buzzword technology, I am able to do the job, as long as it's not a Microsoft shop. Also, if someone was under the impression that I'm a bad employee for switching jobs, they should bear in mind that through the entire thing I probably only worked for a single consulting company. If they don't want to hire me, then I'll scratch them off the list and consider the other 150 companies on my list.
These are good times to be a computer programmer.
You mention consulting companies, and by that I guess you mean body shops...
I work for Ciber, which you could probably consider to be a body shop. They have me working at IBM on a web site development project. I've got a Linux box on my desk, and another one in the machine room. I do Java development mostly, but I've done some TCL too. I work a lot of hours, and because of that I'm going to make much more than Linus Torvalds does this year (I read that he makes $120,000).
I countermand your note. PREFER consulting shops to permanent employment.
-You'll get to do many more things in your career. -You'll work with many more interesting people in your career.
-You'll get to stack your resume with lots of company names: I've personally worked with State of Michigan, Ford, Chrysler, American Express, IBM, Motorola, Dept. of Defense, and Avnet.
-You'll get paid overtime.
-You'll get to pick and choose the projects you want to work on.
-You won't have to pretend that the old social contract is still in force, and consequently you won't be surprised when your permanent employer decides to fire you at age 53, rather than let you retire and have to pay you a pension.
-You'll still get stock purchase plans, 401K's, health and dental insurance, and 3 weeks of vacation a year.
Seeing the code is but the first step. Did you actually *compile* the code and then execute it? Microsoft has given lip service to opening source code before, but they've never promised to release all the source to a working version. Unless you can take the source, compile it, and produce a working executable, then there's no point.
Glass will indeed flow. For typical window glass held in a vertical position, it will gain a 5% increase in width at the bottom after 10 million years. This is a *very* slow flow.
The reason that old glass looks funky has to do with the manufacturing process. Old glass used to be made by hand. The glass blower would blow a ball of glass into a cylindrical mold. After the glass was cold, it would be removed from the mold, and scored lengthwise. After another heating, the cylinder of glass would be broken along the score line and unrolled to form a flat sheet. That flat sheet would be "ironed" smooth, and you could get an acceptable window pane that way.
New glass is made by floating a layer of glass on top of molten tin. The glass solidifies on top of the tin and is very very flat.
There are companies that still make glass the old way, because some people like the flawed appearance. They expect to have windows like that on their old victorian houses. The White House made a large order recently to one of those companies. They replaced a large number of their old windows with glass that looks antique.
You should remember that security by obscurity is no security at all.
If you're going to use steganography, make sure that you're hiding *encrypted* data away.
The recent shouting in England was all about the courts forcing you to turn over the keys if they find encrypted data in an investigation. If you don't have the key, or you lost the key, off to the pokey you go.
Steganography when it's done correctly will most likely prevent the authorities from becoming aware of encrypted data at all. But if they do manage to discover it, another layer of encryption will stop them cold.
Furthermore, encrypted data should look statistically random. They'll have a hell of a time proving that they've got encrypted data and not some kind of random figment of their imagination.
Vegetarian diet and cold weather killed him? Hmmmm. I would have thought it was a combination of crappy medicine and microscopic life forms. Remember folks, most of us are alive today for one reason: we figured out how to battle the bugs. Poor Ramanujan lived before all that. Sorry, rant off.
The real reason that I'm posting is that Ramanujan was a VERY SERIOUS LOVER OF PI. He memorized many many digits, and he invented the Ramanujan series which calculates PI pretty quickly.
And since it was 3.14 March 14th yesterday, that seems appropriate.