He meant $331.48. Funny, when we pass Go in the US we only get $200. In the UK everything costs more - even monopoly houses apparently...
Another couple years, and it'll all be in Yuan anyways, so there's no need to quibble.
(Incidently, I recall the German version where you got DM4000 - about ten times as much. Were there French and Italian versions with local currencies? Are the versions sold today using Euros? How many to pass go?)
But it does kind of fly in the face of the "Don't be evil" slogan.
Not really. There was no malice here anywhere. Nobody tried to be evil, nobody is trying to be evil this moment and nobody is trying to be evil in the future.
Some dude had an idea a couple years back that was so utterly obscurethat no Wikipedia page existed for it. Let that sink in: There's a page on Wikipedia for every actor that was ever seen in the background of any Star Trek episode; yet this supposed "Go language" was so unknown that nobody ever bothered to make a page for it (until yesterday). And the name is a two letter word that cannot actually be googled and is as useless as "to" or "for" or "a" as a search term.
And somehow Google are "evil" for inventing something completely fresh, new, different, that has seen more use in the first 24 hours after release than all of the other guy's stuff in his lifetime and naming it "go"? Sorry, but that just doesn't fly.
The guy should be happy for the exposure and publicity his little thought experiment got from all this.
And with that said, to counteract that, how the heck are they going to avoid lightning and static electricity and so on on *any* tether?
Forget about static or lightining: any such tether is going to short the ionosphere against ground. Good luck with that.
Oh, and then it's going to electromagnetically connect Earth's magnetic field (i.e. the geodynamo) with the magetotail (i.e. the solar wind, which is a pretty long lever arm pointing always away from the sun). Watch Earth's rotational energy being dissipated in form of electric current through your tether. Fun.
Oh, and of course there's never going to be an accident of any sort or even a terrorist attack that might blow up your tether anywhere, raining kilotons of tether material onto the earth (it doesn't really matter what you propose making it from; if a ton of it lands on your head, you're dead).
Oh, and feel free to integrate two vee cross omega along a 180000km climb straight up.
Oh, and bring something to read for the three months ride.
And remind me: you're getting this into orbit how, again?
Let's say that at our current progress it would take us 30 years to develop a way to manufacture the cable.
No. Let's say that it will take us three days to develop the cable.
I mean - as long as we're saying random stuff that has no connection with reality, we might as well say nice, positive, cool, fun things.
Once you've made it clear that you have no interest whatsoever in reality and are merely writing scifi, you might as well make it scifi that is worth listening to.
But we have to start thinking about how much this crap COSTS. $500 million? That's $3-4 taken out of my last paycheck. Just for this project.
$500M is 2.8% of NASA's budget. NASA's budget is 0.5% of the federal budget. The $500M rocket is 0.015% of the federal budget. If you really paid $21,000 in federal taxes on your last paycheck, you should shut the fuck up about the government failing to provide homes for the homeless, and just buy them a shelter yourself.
Amen to that -- oh, and you should have your car registered.
This is something that I could never understand (as a space nerd...)
Would it be harder to take something like an Atlas 5 (that's got literally hundreds of flights under its belt) and modify it for human space flight then to build a completely new rocket (granted taking bits from lots of different rockets)?
Especially with the Ares 5, I think it should just be an Atlas 5.
And it only took them 3 years and $10 billion to launch a modified solid rocket booster with a mass simulator on it. Amazing how fast NASA can develop new technology. Its a good thing they aren't relying on private industry like SpaceX which can make comparable rockets for 1/100 of the cost...
...taking three times as long and blowing up four times before they get a single launch straight.
I'm not an astronaut. But if I were one, I'd much rather travel in a vehicle that was designed and built by people who know what they're doing (even if at elevated cost) such that the first test launch was a success right there. Because that indicates proper engineering.
[...] and they do see the thing they are rewarded for acquiring.
They aren't "rewarded". They don't need to be "rewarded". The genome of units that do NOT seek food is removed from the pool of available genomes. That is all. You evolve this for a couple generations and after a while every single genome in the pool will seek out food. It doesn't have to "know" that it does and it doesn't have to know "why" it does it, it just has to do it. And whenever, wherever any given gene sequence happens to stumble upon the innovation of NOT seeking food it is removed from the pool.
Yes, food is exactly the right word. Because it is a necessary precondition for survival and the passing on of sections of ones genome.
unless you're the author of the underlying study, I am unclear as to how you have knowledge of the methods and science behind what they are doing.
Electron microscopes have been around for decades. So long, in fact, that you do NOT have to explain how an electron microscope works every single time you show a picture taken with an electron microscope. Instead, you publish an article and you say "figure three was taken with an electron microscope" and anybody unclear on the subject can go and read up on how that works.
In the exact same way genetic algorithms have been around for decades. And in the exact same way, you do not have to spell out the precise details of what you're doing every single time you're using one. It is entirely sufficient to say "we used a genetic algorithm to evolve a certain behaviour (like food-seeking or poison avoidance) and found the following interesting social strategies...".
If that isn't enough information for you, then it is up to you to dig up the peer-reviewed literature on the details. In the exact same way as it would be with an article about microchips that happens to show an electron microscope picture without precisely spelling out how electron microscopes work.
If you aren't going to do that, then it means you're lazy, not that the article is "misleading".
It's been many years since I had to contend with a modem, but I sure remember the magical 5kB/sec that you can realistically expect to get from the so-called 56k modems (really 53000 bits per second, a byte is really 10 bits (8 data, one start, one stop) comes to pretty close to 5000 byte/sec) which comes to 18MB/hour. If a CD is 600MB (some are more, some are less) then that would be 33 hours of continuous download through a 56k modem.
Assume less than 100% duty cycle, occasional phone calls, somewhat less than optimal connections -- you fire up the torrent on Monday and by Friday you have the ISO on your harddisk (especially the ISO of a torrent as blazingly fast as Ubuntu, which tends to have a Godzillion seeds about three minutes after it's released).
Are government bodies not entitled to charge a nominal fee for services rendered?
No. First they didn't "render" and service - these records are available electronically anyway.
No, they are not. You are simply and plainly wrong. That's the whole POINT of PACER: to send people into the vaults with tens of millions of pages of paper records and scan them, and check them and collate them and file them so they can be found by the people who need them. When was the last time you scanned tens of millions of pieces of paper? What makes you think this is not a service rendered?
Second these public records were already paid for by public taxes - the "nominal fee" has already been paid by Joe public
No, they haven't. PACER is not receiving tax money. You and your ilk would be frothing at the mouth about the waste of your tax dollars if it were.
Between September 4, 2008 and September 22, 2008, PACER was accessed by computers from outside the library
So the total period of the unauthorized access is 18 days.
The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts reported that the PACER system was being inundated with requests. One request was being made every three seconds.
OK, so one request every 3 seconds counts as "inundated" - just as a quick rough-n-ready yardstick concerning the overall performance metrics of the system. Obviously this was not some vast DB running on a huge server farm - this was (is? I don't know anything about this) running on some old P3-500 at the sad end of a DSL line.
There are less than 90,000 seconds in a day; thus with one request every 3 seconds you cannot get more than 30,000 documents per day. In 18 days this comes to ~500k requests ballpark.
The two accounts were responsible for downloading more than eighteen million pages with an approximate value of $1.5 million."
This means that each request must have averaged some 35--40 page each. A million pages served per day. In plain ASCII I'd guess 2500 bytes for a page of text, which would get us to several GB/day served from a system clearly not set up for this kind of thing. But I suspect this is more like a PDF of scanned documents - which can easily run into the MB/page. Suddenly we're flirting with hundreds of GB (maybe even TB) of data per day.
it began to look like a DOS attack
At this point I would revert the logic: this IS a DOS attack, unless proven otherwise. If I were anywhere in charge I'd investigate this. And if my investigation shows it's just a careless use of the resource I'd see whether I can politely convince the user to tone it down a little. And then I'd let it drop.
[...] here's some more names to consider (in no order): Stanislaw Lem, Assimov, Wells, Philip K. Dick,[...]
etc.
I think this is exactly the wrong approach.
Sit your pupils down in day one class one and talk about sci-fi. Every one of them is bound to know at least one or two. Some will know a lot. Let them suggest things and justify their selections. That process alone will teach them something about literature. In the end be prepared to go with a couple things that came from them that aren't precisely what you would have picked but allow you to get your curriculum through. Allow one thing you don't already know yourself to force yourself to do actual analytical work yourself instead of just regurgitating something you've already done to death a million times before.
Pick one thing yourself that you think complements/contrasts their choices (ideally someone NOT on the parent's list of sf clichees). Show them how/when/where it does so.
I am willing to bet this'll make more neurons spark than a pre-set list of well-worn sci-fi authors.
Sunspots influence the global weather in a measurable (and well-understood) way. Grains grown in a climate either at the upper or lower end of the temperature scale at which they thrive (wheat in Britain, for example, or corn in Arizona) can be pushed into (measurable and predictable) lower harvests and even complete mis-harvests. Why and how global economic measures like the total GDP and the DJA can be sensitive to such things as the global success of food production is left as an exercise to the reader.
Can you find it in your heart to read up to these things? One of the very real, very measurable and very predictable dangers of global warming is the well-studied, well-known and well-understood link between just a degree or two global temperature change and the measurable economic penalties going with it. These things have been measured, tested and modeled for years. (Amongst a myriad of other things, this is one of the ways we know that sunspots are NOT responsible for the drastic global average temperature rise in the 20th century. Because their effect on the global energy budget is measurable.).
Find me a species, mutated by radiation, that subsequently became dangerous to human beings.
Uh, lions? T-Rex? panthers?
In the history of the universe there has never been a T-rex that was dangerous to a human being. Because there were tens of millions of years between the last of the one and the first of the other no matter where, precisely, we draw the line delineating the term "human being".
Note to USA, Russia and China.
Leave us the @#% alone. I heard antipsychotic medication can help with both megalomania and delusions of grandeur.
Note to Britain, Chile and Argentina: Your territorial claims in Antarctica overlap, since you aren't recognizing each other's claims. Maybe you should figure this out amongst yourselves before you insult others who choose not to recognize either of you guys claims?
Hint: When several retarded children all claim that some toy is theirs, it is generally good parenting not to recognize either of those claims.
But France, New Zealand, Norway, and the United Kingdom do.
Not really.
Might as well be precise here: There are seven nations that are making territorial claims in Antarctica: Argentina, Australia, Chile, France, NZ, Norway, and the UK. NO OTHER COUNTRY IN THE WORLD recognizes any of their claims. In particular, the claims made by these seven countries overlap in various places as they do not generally recognize each others claims.
Slashdot Mirror
He meant $331.48. Funny, when we pass Go in the US we only get $200. In the UK everything costs more - even monopoly houses apparently...
Another couple years, and it'll all be in Yuan anyways, so there's no need to quibble.
(Incidently, I recall the German version where you got DM4000 - about ten times as much. Were there French and Italian versions with local currencies? Are the versions sold today using Euros? How many to pass go?)
Wouldn't Go! be pronounced Go(bang)?
There is already a board game called Gobang. Worse: it is played with Go pieces. The exposure to lawsuits here is just too great...
Might as well just name his next programming language "AND" or "IS" so he can whine about people talking, period.
There is already a language named Brainfuck, so we can already whine about people posting on slashdot.
But it does kind of fly in the face of the "Don't be evil" slogan.
Not really. There was no malice here anywhere. Nobody tried to be evil, nobody is trying to be evil this moment and nobody is trying to be evil in the future.
Some dude had an idea a couple years back that was so utterly obscurethat no Wikipedia page existed for it. Let that sink in: There's a page on Wikipedia for every actor that was ever seen in the background of any Star Trek episode; yet this supposed "Go language" was so unknown that nobody ever bothered to make a page for it (until yesterday). And the name is a two letter word that cannot actually be googled and is as useless as "to" or "for" or "a" as a search term.
And somehow Google are "evil" for inventing something completely fresh, new, different, that has seen more use in the first 24 hours after release than all of the other guy's stuff in his lifetime and naming it "go"? Sorry, but that just doesn't fly.
The guy should be happy for the exposure and publicity his little thought experiment got from all this.
Don't use a two letter word for the name, there are a rather limited number of combinations.
I've been fond of the T&A language for quite a while now ...
And with that said, to counteract that, how the heck are they going to avoid lightning and static electricity and so on on *any* tether?
Forget about static or lightining: any such tether is going to short the ionosphere against ground. Good luck with that.
Oh, and then it's going to electromagnetically connect Earth's magnetic field (i.e. the geodynamo) with the magetotail (i.e. the solar wind, which is a pretty long lever arm pointing always away from the sun). Watch Earth's rotational energy being dissipated in form of electric current through your tether. Fun.
Oh, and of course there's never going to be an accident of any sort or even a terrorist attack that might blow up your tether anywhere, raining kilotons of tether material onto the earth (it doesn't really matter what you propose making it from; if a ton of it lands on your head, you're dead).
Oh, and feel free to integrate two vee cross omega along a 180000km climb straight up.
Oh, and bring something to read for the three months ride.
And remind me: you're getting this into orbit how, again?
Let's say that at our current progress it would take us 30 years to develop a way to manufacture the cable.
No. Let's say that it will take us three days to develop the cable.
I mean - as long as we're saying random stuff that has no connection with reality, we might as well say nice, positive, cool, fun things.
Once you've made it clear that you have no interest whatsoever in reality and are merely writing scifi, you might as well make it scifi that is worth listening to.
But we have to start thinking about how much this crap COSTS. $500 million? That's $3-4 taken out of my last paycheck. Just for this project.
$500M is 2.8% of NASA's budget. NASA's budget is 0.5% of the federal budget. The $500M rocket is 0.015% of the federal budget. If you really paid $21,000 in federal taxes on your last paycheck, you should shut the fuck up about the government failing to provide homes for the homeless, and just buy them a shelter yourself.
Amen to that -- oh, and you should have your car registered.
This is something that I could never understand (as a space nerd...) Would it be harder to take something like an Atlas 5 (that's got literally hundreds of flights under its belt) and modify it for human space flight then to build a completely new rocket (granted taking bits from lots of different rockets)? Especially with the Ares 5, I think it should just be an Atlas 5.
That's what happens when, to put it in Mike Griffin's words, 'new questioners lacking subject matter background appear'.
And it only took them 3 years and $10 billion to launch a modified solid rocket booster with a mass simulator on it. Amazing how fast NASA can develop new technology. Its a good thing they aren't relying on private industry like SpaceX which can make comparable rockets for 1/100 of the cost...
...taking three times as long and blowing up four times before they get a single launch straight.
I'm not an astronaut. But if I were one, I'd much rather travel in a vehicle that was designed and built by people who know what they're doing (even if at elevated cost) such that the first test launch was a success right there. Because that indicates proper engineering.
the estimated cost per launch for the Ares I is going to be $1-$2 billion,
{citation needed}
I guess I should'nt try to provide food for thought to someone too retarded to parse the phrase "food for thought".
[...] and they do see the thing they are rewarded for acquiring.
They aren't "rewarded". They don't need to be "rewarded". The genome of units that do NOT seek food is removed from the pool of available genomes. That is all. You evolve this for a couple generations and after a while every single genome in the pool will seek out food. It doesn't have to "know" that it does and it doesn't have to know "why" it does it, it just has to do it. And whenever, wherever any given gene sequence happens to stumble upon the innovation of NOT seeking food it is removed from the pool.
Yes, food is exactly the right word. Because it is a necessary precondition for survival and the passing on of sections of ones genome.
unless you're the author of the underlying study, I am unclear as to how you have knowledge of the methods and science behind what they are doing.
Electron microscopes have been around for decades. So long, in fact, that you do NOT have to explain how an electron microscope works every single time you show a picture taken with an electron microscope. Instead, you publish an article and you say "figure three was taken with an electron microscope" and anybody unclear on the subject can go and read up on how that works.
In the exact same way genetic algorithms have been around for decades. And in the exact same way, you do not have to spell out the precise details of what you're doing every single time you're using one. It is entirely sufficient to say "we used a genetic algorithm to evolve a certain behaviour (like food-seeking or poison avoidance) and found the following interesting social strategies...".
If that isn't enough information for you, then it is up to you to dig up the peer-reviewed literature on the details. In the exact same way as it would be with an article about microchips that happens to show an electron microscope picture without precisely spelling out how electron microscopes work.
If you aren't going to do that, then it means you're lazy, not that the article is "misleading".
It's been many years since I had to contend with a modem, but I sure remember the magical 5kB/sec that you can realistically expect to get from the so-called 56k modems (really 53000 bits per second, a byte is really 10 bits (8 data, one start, one stop) comes to pretty close to 5000 byte/sec) which comes to 18MB/hour. If a CD is 600MB (some are more, some are less) then that would be 33 hours of continuous download through a 56k modem.
Assume less than 100% duty cycle, occasional phone calls, somewhat less than optimal connections -- you fire up the torrent on Monday and by Friday you have the ISO on your harddisk (especially the ISO of a torrent as blazingly fast as Ubuntu, which tends to have a Godzillion seeds about three minutes after it's released).
What was your problem again?
[...] The law is complex, because the world is complex. [...]
...or is it the other way 'round?
Are government bodies not entitled to charge a nominal fee for services rendered?
No. First they didn't "render" and service - these records are available electronically anyway.
No, they are not. You are simply and plainly wrong. That's the whole POINT of PACER: to send people into the vaults with tens of millions of pages of paper records and scan them, and check them and collate them and file them so they can be found by the people who need them. When was the last time you scanned tens of millions of pieces of paper? What makes you think this is not a service rendered?
Second these public records were already paid for by public taxes - the "nominal fee" has already been paid by Joe public
No, they haven't. PACER is not receiving tax money. You and your ilk would be frothing at the mouth about the waste of your tax dollars if it were.
Between September 4, 2008 and September 22, 2008, PACER was accessed by computers from outside the library
So the total period of the unauthorized access is 18 days.
The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts reported that the PACER system was being inundated with requests. One request was being made every three seconds.
OK, so one request every 3 seconds counts as "inundated" - just as a quick rough-n-ready yardstick concerning the overall performance metrics of the system. Obviously this was not some vast DB running on a huge server farm - this was (is? I don't know anything about this) running on some old P3-500 at the sad end of a DSL line.
There are less than 90,000 seconds in a day; thus with one request every 3 seconds you cannot get more than 30,000 documents per day. In 18 days this comes to ~500k requests ballpark.
The two accounts were responsible for downloading more than eighteen million pages with an approximate value of $1.5 million."
This means that each request must have averaged some 35--40 page each. A million pages served per day. In plain ASCII I'd guess 2500 bytes for a page of text, which would get us to several GB/day served from a system clearly not set up for this kind of thing. But I suspect this is more like a PDF of scanned documents - which can easily run into the MB/page. Suddenly we're flirting with hundreds of GB (maybe even TB) of data per day.
it began to look like a DOS attack
At this point I would revert the logic: this IS a DOS attack, unless proven otherwise. If I were anywhere in charge I'd investigate this. And if my investigation shows it's just a careless use of the resource I'd see whether I can politely convince the user to tone it down a little. And then I'd let it drop.
Which appears to be exactly what happened.
[...] here's some more names to consider (in no order): Stanislaw Lem, Assimov, Wells, Philip K. Dick,[...]
etc.
I think this is exactly the wrong approach.
Sit your pupils down in day one class one and talk about sci-fi. Every one of them is bound to know at least one or two. Some will know a lot. Let them suggest things and justify their selections. That process alone will teach them something about literature. In the end be prepared to go with a couple things that came from them that aren't precisely what you would have picked but allow you to get your curriculum through. Allow one thing you don't already know yourself to force yourself to do actual analytical work yourself instead of just regurgitating something you've already done to death a million times before.
Pick one thing yourself that you think complements/contrasts their choices (ideally someone NOT on the parent's list of sf clichees). Show them how/when/where it does so.
I am willing to bet this'll make more neurons spark than a pre-set list of well-worn sci-fi authors.
Cumming{}tonite.
http://www.galleries.com/minerals/silicate/cummingt/cummingt.htm
Yes, I had to google to figure it out. Yes, it is lame.
And don't think there a correlation so profoundly stupid that someone won't publish a "scientific" paper on it.
Sunspots influence the global weather in a measurable (and well-understood) way. Grains grown in a climate either at the upper or lower end of the temperature scale at which they thrive (wheat in Britain, for example, or corn in Arizona) can be pushed into (measurable and predictable) lower harvests and even complete mis-harvests. Why and how global economic measures like the total GDP and the DJA can be sensitive to such things as the global success of food production is left as an exercise to the reader.
Can you find it in your heart to read up to these things? One of the very real, very measurable and very predictable dangers of global warming is the well-studied, well-known and well-understood link between just a degree or two global temperature change and the measurable economic penalties going with it. These things have been measured, tested and modeled for years. (Amongst a myriad of other things, this is one of the ways we know that sunspots are NOT responsible for the drastic global average temperature rise in the 20th century. Because their effect on the global energy budget is measurable.).
Find me a species, mutated by radiation, that subsequently became dangerous to human beings.
Uh, lions? T-Rex? panthers?
In the history of the universe there has never been a T-rex that was dangerous to a human being. Because there were tens of millions of years between the last of the one and the first of the other no matter where, precisely, we draw the line delineating the term "human being".
Nit-picking can go both ways...
Don't we need our radioactive carbon while we're alive?
No.
Note to USA, Russia and China. Leave us the @#% alone. I heard antipsychotic medication can help with both megalomania and delusions of grandeur.
Note to Britain, Chile and Argentina: Your territorial claims in Antarctica overlap, since you aren't recognizing each other's claims. Maybe you should figure this out amongst yourselves before you insult others who choose not to recognize either of you guys claims?
Hint: When several retarded children all claim that some toy is theirs, it is generally good parenting not to recognize either of those claims.
But France, New Zealand, Norway, and the United Kingdom do.
Not really.
Might as well be precise here: There are seven nations that are making territorial claims in Antarctica: Argentina, Australia, Chile, France, NZ, Norway, and the UK. NO OTHER COUNTRY IN THE WORLD recognizes any of their claims. In particular, the claims made by these seven countries overlap in various places as they do not generally recognize each others claims.