Comment Re:Uh, no (Score 1) 815
Not so much logic as "I learned just enough about thermodynamics to prove that the sun can't work".
Not so much logic as "I learned just enough about thermodynamics to prove that the sun can't work".
They'll start naming them the way sequels get named.
Your own dogfood. Eat it.
The numbers posted in the GP are just to get to LEO. The Saturn V got 119MT to LEO, but only 45MT to the moon. That was enough to send three guys, a buggy, and some porn. And one of the guys had to stay behind in lunar orbit (which I guess is what the porn was for).
If we're going to bother with the moon again, we'd like to do something more than just take a quick look around and scurry back to Earth, so we're going to need a lot more than 119MT to LEO.
And if you look at the other numbers for those 300HP engines, they're often getting better gas mileage than their slower predecessors.
I drive a stick. I expect most car jackers today will manage to get maybe three feet away.
More seriously, this really isn't a big deal. Car thieves use much faster and cruder methods, like hammering a screwdriver into the lock, or just break the window. Car alarms are a joke, too. When was the last time you heard somebody's car alarm go off that wasn't due to a big truck running by, or a dog brushing up against it, or kids throwing rocks?
I'm almost certain the joke is older than that, going back to the seven astronauts of the original Mercury program. Some of the early (unmanned) prototype rockets didn't exactly get into space, and these failures were more public than many of the USSR's failures.
There's a movement around the Bible Belt to home school kids to keep them away from textbooks that mention evolution, or as a general protest of government-run education. At some point, it started to become a stereotype in some circles that all home schooled kids fall into this category.
The term "space opera" is already around for that purpose. When George Lucas is giving an interview with a degree of candor, he'll usually use that term to describe Star Wars. Naturally, Lucas doesn't give many interviews with a sense of candor anymore, but I seem to remember him using it in the interview with Leonard Maltin that was in the VHS versions in the '90s.
It was my(admittedly layman's) understanding that a public/private key crypto implementation, assuming it isn't deeply flawed . . .
That last bit right there is the hard part. Making algorithms was a hard task, to be sure. It took eons before humanity had the right mathematics to make RSA possible, but that work is all done now. There isn't all that much work being done in making new crypto algorithms, because we're pretty sure the ones we have will stand up. Even a breakthrough in Quantum Computing or Complexity Theory wouldn't completely destroy everything out there. There is some work to do in hash algorithms (MD5/SHA1), but that's the exception.
However, putting those algorithms into a practical system is hard, and the work has to be more or less started from scratch with each new system. Every single entry point to the system has to be secured, including a lot of non-obvious ones. DeCSS was done because just one software DVD player mishandled the keys, and that toppled everything else.
In other words, Sony has just gone and proved that the only DRM that remains unhacked is the kind that nobody cares to hack. See also: SACD.
I fail to see how that's a bad thing.
Either way, really. Procedural languages turn into a spaghetti mess. Functional languages won't work at all.
b) The leap in the reverse direction, to functional languages, is mostly a simple matter of wrapping blocks in headers and return statements.
Nay, no, notta. Functional languages make you think completely differently about how the computer operates. Simply wrapping things up like that is how you get spaghetti code. The budding programmer will tend to keep writing this way for a long time. Some never grow out of it.
If you start in a language with these two attributes, you're already 1 - 2 years into a collegiate computer science degree.
That's the biggest indictment of CS curriculums I've ever read.
You only see that in Dan Brown novels because it's too dumb of an idea to be actually implemented. Short of a massive breakthrough in computer speeds that they've somehow managed to keep secret, even all the secret government supercomputers in the world would have a hard time breaking AES-128 or RSA-4096 in a reasonable amount of time.
If the government needs to break somebody's crypto, it's done through side-channel attacks. Anything else is a waste of effort.
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not "Eureka!" (I found it!) but "That's funny ..." -- Isaac Asimov