DSL is infinitely faster than cable modems. Why? Because I run my own web and mail servers. The 128K upstream speed that I have (servers allowed by the user agreement) is infinitely faster than the upload speed on a cable modem (servers disallowed by the user agreement).
Besides, I don't send money to cable companies on principle.
Nova had a really great program this week about Rosalind Franklin who did all the crystallography work. Apparently Watson and Crick stole her data and that's what enabled them to come up with the double helix model.
Power: Light Bulbs. eg. The amount of electricity produced in a second by the Hoover Dam would light X light bulbs for a year.
Computer Benchmark: Calculators. eg. It would take a person with a calculator X millions of years to do what this new supercomputer can do in a second.
Height: Empire state buildings. eg. if you stacked a quadrillion pennies they would be X times the height of the Empire State building.
Height 2: Earth-Moon. eg. if you stacked a quadrillion cases of beer, they would reach X% of the way from the Earth to the Moon.
Accuracy: Amazing Hole in One. eg. NASA's space probe reached Saturn only 4 microseconds late. That's like sinking a Hole in One from X billion miles.
Length: Earth circumferences. eg. If you laid all the fiber in the world end-to-end it would stretch around the globe X dozen times.
Volume: Olympic Swimming Pools. eg. a million cases of beer would fill X Olympic Swimming Pools.
Then, there's the famous nanoseconds that Grace Hopper used to pass out. They were little pieces of wire an inch(?) long that represented the distance light travels in 1 nanosecond.
The music companies are too late. I haven't bought any CD's in the past few years, except for Johnny Cash's "American IV" (great record BTW) and I don't plan to buy any more. Now I listen to independant bands on www.garageband.com and I like what I hear. They've got a huge amount of music there, and it's quite a lot of fun to listen to a wide variety of things.
The last book reviews I've read on Slashdot have actually been good. I remember some that were little more than a listing of the title, table of contents, and a thumbs up or down.
Good job on this one. Makes me want to read the book to find out more.
You're the judge of your own situation. For me it's like this:
Houses in my neighborhood are going up 10% a year, even in this sucky economy. My house is the cheapest one on the block. Several of my neighbors have three floor homes with elevators. I'm pretty handy, so I'm doing quite a lot of the remodel work myself, saving money. My wife is a professor, well on her way to tenure. The company I work for is doing well. So, while I might or might not make as much money as you do, I can see your point about stability of a situation.
But you've also got to balance your situation against coming out way behind if things don't get as bad as you fear they might. You'll be 50 years old, buying a house with a very high payment, trying to save for retirement. In my case, I'll have my house paid off, with all the appreciation belonging to me, plus an income that will be larger than it is now unencumbered by a house or rental payment.
You've also got to check your area too. Some places have prices of rental vs. buying that are seriously out of whack. If you can rent really cheaply, it might not make sense to buy after all.
You're probably thinking of the privacy officer that came from DoubleClick. Another obvious choice. The Department of Oxymoronic Mandarins must be well funded this year.
Buying a house isn't spending money, or falling into line with what the gubment wants. It's an investment. If you can put 10% down on a house and make payments on the rest, why would you do that instead of having to save the money AND pay rent?
Basically, for the cost of 10%, you can keep 100% of the appreciation in value of the house. Plus you can live in it. Then, when you sell the house you get all your money back.
Suppose a man came up to you and said "I have an account with a million dollars in it, that earns about 8% a year. If you give me $100,000 plus a small amount every month for at most 30 years, you can have the interest from my account for as long as you want. Then, when you don't want it anymore, I'll give you back all the money you paid and you can keep the interest. Plus you can live in the bank vault with the money for free if you like."
You'd have to be nuts to refuse that deal, but that's essentially what owning a house is like.
SMTP spam can be fixed with something called Hash Cash. Is that idea going anywhere at all? Has anyone written an RFC and submitted it to the IETF? I think that this can be rolled out in a way that doesn't break the existing mail system during the migration of the world to the new system.
When will Slashdot have text ads available? I would buy one or two. This would be a great way for Slashdot to become profitable.
Re:Me-262 effect is overrated
on
Nuke-Lobbing
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The 262 had a MTBF of about 10 hours. But the point was not to let the engine fail. They really only lasted about 5 hours between overhauls - and the overhauls usually were an entire core change. The entire rotating turbine assembly would be shot from the heat.
Re:Restatement of the obvious
on
Nuke-Lobbing
·
· Score: 1
The concept of mutual assured destruction only works if both sides have the overpowering numbers of nukes AND the capacity and control to used them.
a) you do not have the confidence that the other side will not launch accidentally or on the whim of a madman
b) you believe that the enemy has the nukes but cannot command and control them well enough to use them
Now, do you really think that India and Pakistan have the systems in place to meet those conditions? If Pakistan strikes India with an overwhelming attack, how well do you think India will do in the counterattack? Not well. The US could plan for such a thing, because we had bombers in the air all the time, and subs at sea, and lots of dispersed land silos. India will have none of these things. There will be no mutual assured destruction.
OK, that would be me. Just to bring you up to speed - I'm a liberal who has forgotten more about military technology than you probably ever knew. That's just a fact. I'm a technology nut, and military tech is some of the best.
So, whatever you might assume about me -- is wrong. Nothing that I wrote said that the bombs never miss.
Another example: Check out the sizes of Russian nukes compared to the American nukes of the same period. They were bigger, because their rockets weren't as accurate. On the other hand, they needed bigger rockets to lift the heavier nukes, and that helped them get into space.
You're right that accuracy hasn't improved since the late 90's, because that's when the laser bombs were supplanted with the GPS bombs. The laser bombs missed more than the GPS bombs.
You're wrong in your claim that we can't put bombs on a 10 foot target. It happens. It happens quite often. It happens more often than not.
Re:Physics
on
Nuke-Lobbing
·
· Score: 5, Informative
You've got the cart before the horse. This maneuver was never considered for the small nukes, because they didn't exist. And why were the nukes so big way back then? Two reasons. It was harder to make small nukes. The backpack nuke was really hard to make compared to a multi-megaton monster. The other reason is that with inaccurate delivery systems you need big nukes to destroy a target if you miss it by 3 or 4 miles.
As the accuracy of missile systems crept up, the size of the nuke required went down. Now, we can drop a conventional bomb or 4 right through a specific window, so there's hardly any targets that cannot be destroyed by a conventional bomb.
Nukes are basically obsolete as battlefield weapons.
Slashdot Mirror
DSL is infinitely faster than cable modems. Why? Because I run my own web and mail servers. The 128K upstream speed that I have (servers allowed by the user agreement) is infinitely faster than the upload speed on a cable modem (servers disallowed by the user agreement).
Besides, I don't send money to cable companies on principle.
Nova had a really great program this week about Rosalind Franklin who did all the crystallography work. Apparently Watson and Crick stole her data and that's what enabled them to come up with the double helix model.
Hey! Look at your UID! You're the ONE!
Underwear Boy: Do not try and check the underwear. That's impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth.
Neo: What truth?
Underwear Boy: There is no underwear.
Thought of some more that I see a lot:
Power: Light Bulbs. eg. The amount of electricity produced in a second by the Hoover Dam would light X light bulbs for a year.
Computer Benchmark: Calculators. eg. It would take a person with a calculator X millions of years to do what this new supercomputer can do in a second.
Height: Empire state buildings. eg. if you stacked a quadrillion pennies they would be X times the height of the Empire State building.
Height 2: Earth-Moon. eg. if you stacked a quadrillion cases of beer, they would reach X% of the way from the Earth to the Moon.
Accuracy: Amazing Hole in One. eg. NASA's space probe reached Saturn only 4 microseconds late. That's like sinking a Hole in One from X billion miles.
Length: Earth circumferences. eg. If you laid all the fiber in the world end-to-end it would stretch around the globe X dozen times.
Volume: Olympic Swimming Pools. eg. a million cases of beer would fill X Olympic Swimming Pools.
Then, there's the famous nanoseconds that Grace Hopper used to pass out. They were little pieces of wire an inch(?) long that represented the distance light travels in 1 nanosecond.
The music companies are too late. I haven't bought any CD's in the past few years, except for Johnny Cash's "American IV" (great record BTW) and I don't plan to buy any more. Now I listen to independant bands on www.garageband.com and I like what I hear. They've got a huge amount of music there, and it's quite a lot of fun to listen to a wide variety of things.
I don't quite understand. You teach a class for people who are getting concealed handgun permits? Or is this something else?
Why can't you use whatever photos you want to teach a class? How do you use these photos?
Open source: lots and lots of volunteers with shovels.
The last book reviews I've read on Slashdot have actually been good. I remember some that were little more than a listing of the title, table of contents, and a thumbs up or down.
Good job on this one. Makes me want to read the book to find out more.
The business plan
1) Collect baby teeth
2) ???
3) Profit!
You're the judge of your own situation. For me it's like this:
Houses in my neighborhood are going up 10% a year, even in this sucky economy. My house is the cheapest one on the block. Several of my neighbors have three floor homes with elevators. I'm pretty handy, so I'm doing quite a lot of the remodel work myself, saving money. My wife is a professor, well on her way to tenure. The company I work for is doing well. So, while I might or might not make as much money as you do, I can see your point about stability of a situation.
But you've also got to balance your situation against coming out way behind if things don't get as bad as you fear they might. You'll be 50 years old, buying a house with a very high payment, trying to save for retirement. In my case, I'll have my house paid off, with all the appreciation belonging to me, plus an income that will be larger than it is now unencumbered by a house or rental payment.
You've also got to check your area too. Some places have prices of rental vs. buying that are seriously out of whack. If you can rent really cheaply, it might not make sense to buy after all.
You're probably thinking of the privacy officer that came from DoubleClick. Another obvious choice. The Department of Oxymoronic Mandarins must be well funded this year.
Buying a house isn't spending money, or falling into line with what the gubment wants. It's an investment. If you can put 10% down on a house and make payments on the rest, why would you do that instead of having to save the money AND pay rent?
Basically, for the cost of 10%, you can keep 100% of the appreciation in value of the house. Plus you can live in it. Then, when you sell the house you get all your money back.
Suppose a man came up to you and said "I have an account with a million dollars in it, that earns about 8% a year. If you give me $100,000 plus a small amount every month for at most 30 years, you can have the interest from my account for as long as you want. Then, when you don't want it anymore, I'll give you back all the money you paid and you can keep the interest. Plus you can live in the bank vault with the money for free if you like."
You'd have to be nuts to refuse that deal, but that's essentially what owning a house is like.
SMTP spam can be fixed with something called Hash Cash. Is that idea going anywhere at all? Has anyone written an RFC and submitted it to the IETF? I think that this can be rolled out in a way that doesn't break the existing mail system during the migration of the world to the new system.
When will Slashdot have text ads available? I would buy one or two. This would be a great way for Slashdot to become profitable.
The 262 had a MTBF of about 10 hours. But the point was not to let the engine fail. They really only lasted about 5 hours between overhauls - and the overhauls usually were an entire core change. The entire rotating turbine assembly would be shot from the heat.
The concept of mutual assured destruction only works if both sides have the overpowering numbers of nukes AND the capacity and control to used them.
Mutual assured destruction falls apart completely if:
a) you do not have the confidence that the other side will not launch accidentally or on the whim of a madman
b) you believe that the enemy has the nukes but cannot command and control them well enough to use them
Now, do you really think that India and Pakistan have the systems in place to meet those conditions? If Pakistan strikes India with an overwhelming attack, how well do you think India will do in the counterattack? Not well. The US could plan for such a thing, because we had bombers in the air all the time, and subs at sea, and lots of dispersed land silos. India will have none of these things. There will be no mutual assured destruction.
Low end yoeld on the B61 is 300 tons, which is the unboosted yield. (just the fission part).
OK, that would be me. Just to bring you up to speed - I'm a liberal who has forgotten more about military technology than you probably ever knew. That's just a fact. I'm a technology nut, and military tech is some of the best.
So, whatever you might assume about me -- is wrong. Nothing that I wrote said that the bombs never miss.
Want to try again?
I presume you mean randomness when you say white noise.
That's not even remotely accurate. Natural selection isn't random in the least.
I meant making it smaller.
Another example: Check out the sizes of Russian nukes compared to the American nukes of the same period. They were bigger, because their rockets weren't as accurate. On the other hand, they needed bigger rockets to lift the heavier nukes, and that helped them get into space.
You're right that accuracy hasn't improved since the late 90's, because that's when the laser bombs were supplanted with the GPS bombs. The laser bombs missed more than the GPS bombs.
You're wrong in your claim that we can't put bombs on a 10 foot target. It happens. It happens quite often. It happens more often than not.
You've got the cart before the horse. This maneuver was never considered for the small nukes, because they didn't exist. And why were the nukes so big way back then? Two reasons. It was harder to make small nukes. The backpack nuke was really hard to make compared to a multi-megaton monster. The other reason is that with inaccurate delivery systems you need big nukes to destroy a target if you miss it by 3 or 4 miles.
As the accuracy of missile systems crept up, the size of the nuke required went down. Now, we can drop a conventional bomb or 4 right through a specific window, so there's hardly any targets that cannot be destroyed by a conventional bomb.
Nukes are basically obsolete as battlefield weapons.
Strange, first thing I noticed was that ultramodern abcde keyboard layout. I wonder if it's faster than qwerty.