Sure, if the satellite has a recieving dish and someone else has a transmitter:)
Actually, a microwave beam could probably defrost their fuel if it were aimed at the craft. If we had missile defense space lasers, they could do that. But, we don't.
Perhaps the probe could be maneuvered to just graze the Mars atmosphere enough to heat it up and defrost the fuel, then fire the rockets to put it in Mars orbit? Could be a long shot, but if there's no other choice . . .
The slow and bloated Zeppelin NT, based on Zeppelin/2 technology, will fail to displace the faster, more reliable AirX technology until version 4.0, and only really become accepted upon being renamed to Zeppelin 2000 and later Zeppelin XP.
Actually, I think that the difference is not between governments but between cultures in general. I guess you could argue that the government originates in the culture, I don't know. But usually people assume that if they read someone's book or listen to someone's song, they are doing what the person wanted them to do by publishing in the first place. This concept of stealing is really perverse, especially in countries where it's 100-1000 times cheaper to copy than to buy, rather than the 10-100 times that it is in the US (talking about economics here, not morality).
In the US there is a large number of people who will balk at pirating a copy of Windows because it's "wrong." I don't think that the number is as high anywhere else, government policy aside.
In that case, oil, the sun, and every other "energy source" is actually a power storage technology also. Regular hydroelectric also uses pre pressurized water, is that a power storage technology?
People are commenting that if 100 flights took place in a year instead of 4, we wouldn't worry about safety so much. But I think what's frustrating about the Columbia and the Challenger accidents is that they were caused by seemingly simple problems which were known before the accident occurred. Not a single astronaut has been killed by any of the things that make space dangerous: asteroids, radiation, etc. They have been killed by essentially terrestrial things that we expect to happen on a passenger car (leaky seals, cracked body panels) but not a multi billion dollar spacecraft. It's like sailing out of a storm alive and then drowning as you step off the boat.
And what would they have done if they found a hole in the wing? Patched it up with duct tape? Unfortunately, our technological limitations make the kind of cavalier attitude that you have impractical. Sure, it worked with Apollo 13, but then if you remember, they weren't sure if their heat shield was intact either. They just had to go in with their fingers crossed. Unfortunately, it's going to have to be this frustrating for a while to come.
Every time there is an article about more intelligent robots being made, people ask what will happen to the humans they replace, how will they have jobs, what if the robots want to kill us off, etc.
My reply to that is that we replace ourselves with intelligent machines constantly and have done so for millions of years. These intelligent machines usually end up exceeding us in their capabilities and so replace us in the job market. We end up spending the rest of our days building model boats and gardening.
Just because some machines are made of hydrocarbons and some of metal doesn't make one more worthy of succeeding us than the other. And a machine that can do any job a human can will also be able to appreciate art, science, etc. fully as much as we do.
Moreover, the very foundation of evolution, and the reason why we even exist, is because machines before us have been replacing themselves with better versions for billions of years. Only we can speed the process up because instead of mutating DNA to produce new beings, we mutate ideas.
We will create living things that can grasp the beauty and wonder of the universe far better than we can, and give each other the joy we only wish we could give our loved ones. It would be quite selfish to want anything else.
For all of you who are saying that because liberals or environmentalists are to blame for this because they prevented infrastructure improvements:
Every single (democratic) country in the world has liberals and environmetalists. Yet presumably, their grids are better than ours (otherwise there is no cause to complain).
If a government can't reconcile these differences of opinion into a coherent policy, this is the failure of the government as a whole. If someone made a decision that new plants have to be built, it would happen, and there would be very little that liberals could do to stop it, other than picketing and writing letters.
It is when elected officials have no policy in the first place, and the relevant departments are asleep at the wheel, that important work becomes subject to the wihms of the populace.
The way wormholes are supposed to work is that they provide a shortcut through (n>3)-dimensional space around a bend in 3-space. But if the universe is flat, does that mean that wormholes would be useless?
One more reason why the standard file hierarchy needs to change is the difficulty of doing file management. Let's say I put in an application and now I want to remove it; I have no idea where to look for its files. Even using RPM or another package manager doesn't always work. What if I extracted a tarball and now want to know where its files went? Here are the choices for where executable X got place: */usr/bin */usr/local/bin */usr/X11R6/bi n */usr/local/X/bin */X/bin */local/bin */loca l/X/bin */usr/X/bin and the list goes on.
In contrast, on a windows machine, if I want to remove an application X, I can be 99% sure that all of its files are either in/X,/Program Files/X,/Windows, or/Windows/System.
What if I want to clean my hard drive? On a Windows machine, I can look through the directory names to find programs I no longer use. The only exception is/Windows and/Windows/System which get very big and accumulate all sorts of stuff.
On a Linux system, every directory is like/Windows. This includes/bin,/etc,/usr and all the subdirectories of/usr. Yes, packages help with this, but only if I installed it as a binary.
What if I want to give my computer to someone which has a fully configured setup but also a lot of my personal settings and programs? Beyond the things in ~, I'm lost.
OK, so let's say you have a computer program and associated hardware that let you drag and drop little blocks to make the most lethal virus you can think of. Viruses that target humans have been evolving for as long as humans have, which is several million years. If it were possible to make a virus that would cause extremely massive casualties, don't you think it would have evolved already?
It is not possible for a virus to kill more than a certain percentage of a population because at some point the population gets so sparse that the virus can no longer spread. When we consider modern methods of quarantine, disinfection, and treatment, I find the possibility of a highly lethal virus even less believable.
The reason why biological weapons are scary is because they can spread a virus much more efficiently than it can spread itself. But making biological weapons requires big machines which, as the author says, are "easily visible by satellite." So I don't think he has much of an arugment.
The Chinese never denied the existence of SARS. They reported it when it was still confined to a single hospital. The World Health Oragnization and other medical groups immediately issued a mild alert which they have since upgraded. The Chinese are fully cooperating in this, this is exactly what we want any government to do in the case of an outbreak. Read the news sometime . . .
Re:Understanding the symbols
on
Imagining Numbers
·
· Score: 5, Informative
I highly recommend http://mathworld.wolfram.com for all your math reference needs. You may be referring to the greek alphabet, which is used extensively in math as a source of extra variable names. You can google for that. And I assume you're familiar with the differential symbol (a backwards 6 or a d), the integral symbol (a stretched out S), and the sum symbol (a capital sigma). If you don't know what those are, check mathworld.
It looks like this particular incarnation of a bio-battery isn't so useful, but it makes me wonder: a battery discharges essentially by eating away at one of the electrodes. When a battery is recharged, the metal from the electrode is re-deposited on it, however this doesn't happen quickly, efficiently, or completely. Perhaps it would be possible to find a species of bacteria that could help in this process? Perhaps the electrolyte could have some kind of nutrient in it that the bacteria would eat and re-deposit the metal in the process?
Think of it this way: a musical instrument is tuned to play exactly one frequency (and its harmonics) whenever you hit a key/pluck a string/etc. The reason why it doesn't mess with the ear's filtering is because every physical object vibrates at a range of frequencies -- this is where we get these off-peak frequencies that get filtered out in the first place.
So what the author is missing is that when a speaker reproduces a frequency, it too will produce an entire range surrounding that one frequency, putting back the noise removed from the MP3 by encoding!
He is right that the closer we get to hearing a single-frequency peak, the more unpleasant it is. Tuning forks are an example. However a speaker can't get anywhere near the precision of a tuning fork . . .
You need not feel bad that you're going back to Detroit. It has no lack of abandoned structures. Check this out for a start: http://www.forgottendetroit.com/. Also try the Urban Exploration Ring for the website about your area!
The Yoko Ono quote reminded me of this verse by Phil Ochs: "Show me the country Where the bombs had to fall Show me the ruins Of the buildings once so tall And I'll show you a young land With many reasons why There but for fortune May go you or I"
The reviews of this book bring up an interesting point that I have wondered about for a number of years. Is there in fact some proof that the only way to find out the final state of a cellular automaton is to run it? How do we in fact know that it's not collapsible to some sort of mathematical function? I have been thinking that if it were possible to do this, and we found out how, we could predict complex phenomena much better than we can now.
Re:"Pr0n software for the Apple ]["???
on
Harddrive Speakers
·
· Score: 1
I actually remember one of the (pirated?) Apple
][ games in elementary school had something like this in the intro screen. Every so often someone would load this game . . .
Teacher: "Danny, what are you doing?"
Danny: "Oh, I don't know where that came from" *goes back to sipping Mott's*
For people of Russian descent (I am one), the concept of purchasing music and software hasn't existed for some time. The RIAA's idea that recorded music can be controlled is the result of obedient Americans (and possibly Western Europeans).
In the Soviet Union, we always used to copy all types of recordings onto tape. This is still done by Russian immigrants in the US (and by many others, I'm sure). The RIAA thinks that because CDs are better, people would never copy them onto tapes. Well, the small loss of quality is negligible compared to having a chance to listen to the music in the first place.
I visited St.Petersburg, Russia recently. The underground walks that lead to the subway stations are lined with kiosks selling all sorts of magazines, medicine, etc, but mostly CDs. There must be tens of thousands of CDs in total at any single station. These kiosks are 100% legal.
The CDs? Collections of every type of software imaginable, collections of music (such as every song ever released by U2 on one CD), etc. They go for a few dollars apiece (*30 for rubles). Most Russians can't afford to spend thousands of dollars on software or hundreds of dollars on music. Thus the pirate CD industry for them fulfills an essential market.
Furthermore, these CDs then get imported into the US where they fulfill the same exact market. There aren't too many people who can afford to spend $20 on a CD for every singer they want to listen to.
Are they wrong to do this? I personally would say that the artists and software companies benefit, since for them this is free publicity. It is the companies' own fault that they charge unreasonable prices for their products that these people could never afford to pay anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, if the satellite has a recieving dish and someone else has a transmitter :)
Actually, a microwave beam could probably defrost their fuel if it were aimed at the craft. If we had missile defense space lasers, they could do that. But, we don't.
Perhaps the probe could be maneuvered to just graze the Mars atmosphere enough to heat it up and defrost the fuel, then fire the rockets to put it in Mars orbit? Could be a long shot, but if there's no other choice . . .
The slow and bloated Zeppelin NT, based on Zeppelin/2 technology, will fail to displace the faster, more reliable AirX technology until version 4.0, and only really become accepted upon being renamed to Zeppelin 2000 and later Zeppelin XP.
Actually, I think that the difference is not between governments but between cultures in general. I guess you could argue that the government originates in the culture, I don't know. But usually people assume that if they read someone's book or listen to someone's song, they are doing what the person wanted them to do by publishing in the first place. This concept of stealing is really perverse, especially in countries where it's 100-1000 times cheaper to copy than to buy, rather than the 10-100 times that it is in the US (talking about economics here, not morality).
In the US there is a large number of people who will balk at pirating a copy of Windows because it's "wrong." I don't think that the number is as high anywhere else, government policy aside.
Hm, so this is
a) An attempt to hide public information
b) Implemented in the most naive possible way
c) Totally useless at (a)
Something tells me Dubya doubles as the White House sysadmin . . .
In that case, oil, the sun, and every other "energy source" is actually a power storage technology also. Regular hydroelectric also uses pre pressurized water, is that a power storage technology?
People are commenting that if 100 flights took place in a year instead of 4, we wouldn't worry about safety so much. But I think what's frustrating about the Columbia and the Challenger accidents is that they were caused by seemingly simple problems which were known before the accident occurred. Not a single astronaut has been killed by any of the things that make space dangerous: asteroids, radiation, etc. They have been killed by essentially terrestrial things that we expect to happen on a passenger car (leaky seals, cracked body panels) but not a multi billion dollar spacecraft. It's like sailing out of a storm alive and then drowning as you step off the boat.
And what would they have done if they found a hole in the wing? Patched it up with duct tape? Unfortunately, our technological limitations make the kind of cavalier attitude that you have impractical. Sure, it worked with Apollo 13, but then if you remember, they weren't sure if their heat shield was intact either. They just had to go in with their fingers crossed. Unfortunately, it's going to have to be this frustrating for a while to come.
Every time there is an article about more intelligent robots being made, people ask what will happen to the humans they replace, how will they have jobs, what if the robots want to kill us off, etc.
My reply to that is that we replace ourselves with intelligent machines constantly and have done so for millions of years. These intelligent machines usually end up exceeding us in their capabilities and so replace us in the job market. We end up spending the rest of our days building model boats and gardening.
Just because some machines are made of hydrocarbons and some of metal doesn't make one more worthy of succeeding us than the other. And a machine that can do any job a human can will also be able to appreciate art, science, etc. fully as much as we do.
Moreover, the very foundation of evolution, and the reason why we even exist, is because machines before us have been replacing themselves with better versions for billions of years. Only we can speed the process up because instead of mutating DNA to produce new beings, we mutate ideas.
We will create living things that can grasp the beauty and wonder of the universe far better than we can, and give each other the joy we only wish we could give our loved ones. It would be quite selfish to want anything else.
For all of you who are saying that because liberals or environmentalists are to blame for this because they prevented infrastructure improvements:
Every single (democratic) country in the world has liberals and environmetalists. Yet presumably, their grids are better than ours (otherwise there is no cause to complain).
If a government can't reconcile these differences of opinion into a coherent policy, this is the failure of the government as a whole. If someone made a decision that new plants have to be built, it would happen, and there would be very little that liberals could do to stop it, other than picketing and writing letters.
It is when elected officials have no policy in the first place, and the relevant departments are asleep at the wheel, that important work becomes subject to the wihms of the populace.
The way wormholes are supposed to work is that they provide a shortcut through (n>3)-dimensional space around a bend in 3-space. But if the universe is flat, does that mean that wormholes would be useless?
One more reason why the standard file hierarchy needs to change is the difficulty of doing file management. Let's say I put in an application and now I want to remove it; I have no idea where to look for its files. Even using RPM or another package manager doesn't always work. What if I extracted a tarball and now want to know where its files went? Here are the choices for where executable X got place:i na l/X/bin
/X, /Program Files/X, /Windows, or /Windows/System.
/Windows and /Windows/System which get very big and accumulate all sorts of stuff.
/Windows. This includes /bin, /etc, /usr and all the subdirectories of /usr. Yes, packages help with this, but only if I installed it as a binary.
*/usr/bin
*/usr/local/bin
*/usr/X11R6/b
*/usr/local/X/bin
*/X/bin
*/local/bin
*/loc
*/usr/X/bin
and the list goes on.
In contrast, on a windows machine, if I want to remove an application X, I can be 99% sure that all of its files are either in
What if I want to clean my hard drive? On a Windows machine, I can look through the directory names to find programs I no longer use. The only exception is
On a Linux system, every directory is like
What if I want to give my computer to someone which has a fully configured setup but also a lot of my personal settings and programs? Beyond the things in ~, I'm lost.
Or else he would have known the importance of laying out your circuits to minimize crosstalk . . .
OK, so let's say you have a computer program and associated hardware that let you drag and drop little blocks to make the most lethal virus you can think of. Viruses that target humans have been evolving for as long as humans have, which is several million years. If it were possible to make a virus that would cause extremely massive casualties, don't you think it would have evolved already?
It is not possible for a virus to kill more than a certain percentage of a population because at some point the population gets so sparse that the virus can no longer spread. When we consider modern methods of quarantine, disinfection, and treatment, I find the possibility of a highly lethal virus even less believable.
The reason why biological weapons are scary is because they can spread a virus much more efficiently than it can spread itself. But making biological weapons requires big machines which, as the author says, are "easily visible by satellite." So I don't think he has much of an arugment.
The Chinese never denied the existence of SARS. They reported it when it was still confined to a single hospital. The World Health Oragnization and other medical groups immediately issued a mild alert which they have since upgraded. The Chinese are fully cooperating in this, this is exactly what we want any government to do in the case of an outbreak. Read the news sometime . . .
Welcome to the Britney Spears Guide to Semiconductor Physics!
I highly recommend http://mathworld.wolfram.com for all your math reference needs. You may be referring to the greek alphabet, which is used extensively in math as a source of extra variable names. You can google for that. And I assume you're familiar with the differential symbol (a backwards 6 or a d), the integral symbol (a stretched out S), and the sum symbol (a capital sigma). If you don't know what those are, check mathworld.
It looks like this particular incarnation of a bio-battery isn't so useful, but it makes me wonder: a battery discharges essentially by eating away at one of the electrodes. When a battery is recharged, the metal from the electrode is re-deposited on it, however this doesn't happen quickly, efficiently, or completely. Perhaps it would be possible to find a species of bacteria that could help in this process? Perhaps the electrolyte could have some kind of nutrient in it that the bacteria would eat and re-deposit the metal in the process?
Think of it this way: a musical instrument is tuned to play exactly one frequency (and its harmonics) whenever you hit a key/pluck a string/etc. The reason why it doesn't mess with the ear's filtering is because every physical object vibrates at a range of frequencies -- this is where we get these off-peak frequencies that get filtered out in the first place.
So what the author is missing is that when a speaker reproduces a frequency, it too will produce an entire range surrounding that one frequency, putting back the noise removed from the MP3 by encoding!
He is right that the closer we get to hearing a single-frequency peak, the more unpleasant it is. Tuning forks are an example. However a speaker can't get anywhere near the precision of a tuning fork . . .
You need not feel bad that you're going back to Detroit. It has no lack of abandoned structures. Check this out for a start: http://www.forgottendetroit.com/. Also try the Urban Exploration Ring for the website about your area!
But here's what it looked like, with labels identifying the equipment:
http://www.shre.ws/shrews/scitech/myroom.html
The Yoko Ono quote reminded me of this verse by Phil Ochs:
"Show me the country
Where the bombs had to fall
Show me the ruins
Of the buildings once so tall
And I'll show you a young land
With many reasons why
There but for fortune
May go you or I"
The reviews of this book bring up an interesting point that I have wondered about for a number of years. Is there in fact some proof that the only way to find out the final state of a cellular automaton is to run it? How do we in fact know that it's not collapsible to some sort of mathematical function? I have been thinking that if it were possible to do this, and we found out how, we could predict complex phenomena much better than we can now.
I actually remember one of the (pirated?) Apple
][ games in elementary school had something like this in the intro screen. Every so often someone would load this game . . .
Teacher: "Danny, what are you doing?"
Danny: "Oh, I don't know where that came from" *goes back to sipping Mott's*
In that case, shouldn't it be
i=0;
while(ilen_total_sex_time){
total_sex_time[i]=total_sex_time[++i];
}
Quality(total_sex_time,Rose)*totalroses + Quality)total_sex_time,Dinner) = total_sex_time[i];
For people of Russian descent (I am one), the concept of purchasing music and software hasn't existed for some time. The RIAA's idea that recorded music can be controlled is the result of obedient Americans (and possibly Western Europeans).
In the Soviet Union, we always used to copy all types of recordings onto tape. This is still done by Russian immigrants in the US (and by many others, I'm sure). The RIAA thinks that because CDs are better, people would never copy them onto tapes. Well, the small loss of quality is negligible compared to having a chance to listen to the music in the first place.
I visited St.Petersburg, Russia recently. The underground walks that lead to the subway stations are lined with kiosks selling all sorts of magazines, medicine, etc, but mostly CDs. There must be tens of thousands of CDs in total at any single station. These kiosks are 100% legal.
The CDs? Collections of every type of software imaginable, collections of music (such as every song ever released by U2 on one CD), etc. They go for a few dollars apiece (*30 for rubles). Most Russians can't afford to spend thousands of dollars on software or hundreds of dollars on music. Thus the pirate CD industry for them fulfills an essential market.
Furthermore, these CDs then get imported into the US where they fulfill the same exact market. There aren't too many people who can afford to spend $20 on a CD for every singer they want to listen to.
Are they wrong to do this? I personally would say that the artists and software companies benefit, since for them this is free publicity. It is the companies' own fault that they charge unreasonable prices for their products that these people could never afford to pay anyway.