phoenix_ca

I find your extreme generalizations of Accellerando pointless. The post was helpful in that it added clarity. Please stop jumping the gun and assuming he's therefore a grammar nazi. It's not being a "grammar nazi" to suggest that people can improve the readability of their posts for the benefit of others. (I honestly have a great deal of trouble reading the OP, and didn't bother to read it because of said difficulty.)

Waffles. My well-being was markedly improved upon my acquiring a waffle-iron. That said, pancakes are also delicious. Either one with maple syrup amounts to tasty-syrup-awesome in my mouth. (Real maple syrup, not the supermarket crap that is mostly corn syrup. It just doesn't compare. Sadly the price of maple syrup has soared recently due to a poor season in Quebec.)

Nah. Uroporphyrinogen decarboxylase is important. Couldn't live without it. Well...you might be able to live without it. Just need to replace it with something else that's just as awesome. *ahem* As to the OP...that's scary. Yeah. Never, ever touching that stuff. Though I've already learned that any chemical that doesn't follow the basic rules of high-school chemistry bonding probably has wacky, possibly very scary properties.

Which is why job applications should be handled with a measure of rigor similar to scientific double-blind testing. If I conduct a job interview, I want the person's voice distorted, their name blacked-out on the resume, and they should be behind frosted glass. All I want is their qualifications. Hell, make them converse with me over an instant messenger, so I could only potentially judge them based on their grammar, or lack of it (which would be a valuable indicator of whether or not they can write well, which is an important skill).

Pretty much. I think we can assume that Steam users here who've purchased the game will get Steam keys. Probably. Try to remember guys, we aren't dealing with EA or Ubisoft here (companies that, based on their behaviour, view their customers with some measure of disdain).

Doesn't mean they're any smarter for it. Imperial units don't have the same base for different units of the same measure. O.o Take length. In metric, it's base 10. Always, base 10. Every measure of length can be represented with a different unit easily (that is, you can convert Mm to km, or mm, merely by multiplying/dividing a certain number of times by 10). Imperial is just plain weird; 12 inches in a foot, 3 feet in a yard, 1760 yards in a mile. It doesn't follow any predictable pattern, nor one standard rule for all possible conversions. SI units do not suffer these inconsistencies. Your example also depends on generalizing a very specific use-case. Most of the world uses SI units, as do practically all scientists. I'd argue strongly that the USA should stop the non-sense and convert these important calculations to SI units. It makes cooperation with other nations easier, makes writing software to compute these units easier and less prone to error, and avoids blowing-up their precious spacecraft.

Looks promising. I think I might just take the gamble that it'll be awesome. >.>

I don't see any compelling reason why an AI that is entirely different from human beings would necessarily need to be like us. To place such constraints on a hypothetical other intelligence is rather short-sighted. There are undoubtedly possible intelligences greater than ours that are so far detached from our own that we could not (at least intuitively) understand them. Thus I don't see why any AI necessarily needs to have anything that at all resembles human emotions. The arguments brought forward in favour of intelligence requiring emotion are based on evidence gathered from human minds, not non-human ones. I can grant you that some level of controlled and interpreted randomness may well be a requirement for another mind to function, but not emotion, at least not in the classical sense. Emotions drive persons to do incredibly inept and illogical actions, like killing others in fits of passion. The argument that emotions are somehow required to determine what is virtuous, good or evil, also seems to me to be a continuation of the somewhat misguided assertion by Hume that one cannon derive an ought from an is. Well, no, we can use logic and science to aid in the determinations of what is moral, and better yet, it can possibly be done in a way that is universal to all minds, or rather, all complex systems capable of self-analysis and analysis of the universe.

Um, the OP brought-up SpaceX...while yes, they do provide Imperial units of measure, the primary units on their website are all given as SI standard (metric). Well, most of them anyway. The big important ones at least. Sometimes they flip back to Imperial for things which just makes their documents confusing. (Not that I mean to crusade against Imperial measurement units but...really? Really? I live in Canada and am perpetually confuddled because we mix the two in all sorts of weird ways.)

Once they get most of the main features in, then they can think about serious optimization. It's a really bad idea most of the time to start optimizing things early, because the changes you make now might make it more difficult to add new features later, or be rendered as time-wasted after you have to tear apart that function/module/thingy again to add more stuff and things. So...*shrug* One can be fairly certain the code isn't optimized, and won't be until doing so won't be a waste of time. They're still busy adding all sorts of nifty things and stuff, stuff and things, and so on...

He might not understand the finer details, but I think most people of any age can understand the sheer awe-inspiring scale of the universe Sagan conveyed when they watch that series. One needn't understand the fine details of science to appreciate its uses and applications (though some kinda miss the point entirely by joyfully accepting technological improvements while showing no respect for other concepts founded on the same principles of reasoning, like evolution...*sigh*).

Since no-one has asked: You are inputting those coordinates from ISA MapSat into MechJeb as decimal, right? I've found ISA MapSat's data to be more than sufficient for accurate landing targets. ISA MapSat scans at a resolution of 0.01 degrees (each data point represents a cell of 0.01x0.01 degrees, so the "real" area represented by each cell varies greatly and is dependent on the planet's equatorial radius).

Cool beans. I've been scanning Kerbin and have about 700MB now. Things might behave oddly when I combine the data, because of the potential for duplicate data points. It's a bit of a crap shoot. If we're lucky, we'll have all collected a lot of unique data points. If we're unlucky, there will be lots of duplicates and only a bit of unique data. We'll see.

Assuming an equal-area map projection, that'd be right. Unfortunately, ISA MapSat projects maps using a Mercator projection, so while your calculation would be accurate for the equator, it would be increasingly inaccurate as you move away from it. However, it should work (roughly) for all areas of the polar map projections. Ish. For those offering to help, go ahead and send me your Kerbin data for now. I'll mush it all together with my own (like soup!) and see what we get.

Go for it! I was silently hoping someone might do such a thing. Yeah. I've contemplated adding little return lines of a different colour for each destination, but it's way too crowded while also trying to fit into the rules for signatures. :/

MS Paint!? Dear gods, use Gimp or something! Cut that 10hrs to 1! O.O Still, fun.

It looks like you uploaded it as an attachment. The forum automatically resizes images; you'll need to upload the image somewhere else. (Even img.ur ...however that's spelt, will do.) Thanks Awaras; my brain is far too slow this late/early in the day.

I'd say that the thing that makes KSP a good bet is mods. The dev team has already made it pretty darn easy for modders to add parts and plugins (things that actually add code...that's...a very rare thing indeed). I think that shows that they know just how important a healthy modding community can be. To compare it to Minecraft: I didn't buy MC until I found Tekkit. Until I found-out there was a comprehensive pack of mods to the game that would add lots of functionality and various cool things for me to do, even a freakin' 16-bit computer (Yeah, I totally learned Forth just to program RP2's computer), I was utterly bored by Minecraft. Sure, I could build a few things, but there was so little complexity, and no real beauty to any of it. The most depressing thing about that was when I found out just how hard it is to modify Minecraft. You first need to decompile the source code (a monumental task if there ever was one), then learn how it all works, then kludge in your own code and classes, overwriting the official code, then recompile the whole mess. It's a really, really brute-force way of customizing a piece of software (and would be an even worse nightmare if they obfuscated their code better or wrote it all in C...eugh). Comparatively, life is very, very simple when modding KSP. You write your own library of code, a simple line in the part.cfg invokes that class, and presto, you have a working mod that adds functionality, a GUI, and new awesome things. And better yet, we don't need to decompile Squad's code to do it, which is arguably better for both parties. Mod support this early in development shows a great deal of foresight on their part.

The zip contains the base image (you haven't gone to any planets), and then a layer for every possible highlighted route, all named (including one that can be used on it's own called "all"). You layer the highlighted route images on top of the base image (and each other), and you get a composite image that shows everywhere you've been. If you're having trouble with the concept of layers, I suggest watching a Photoshop tutorial on the subject (the program might be different but the concepts are the same across every image-editing program I've seen).

No, absolutely no. Isp is for each engine...I'm not sure where you get the idea that it'd be halved by two engines, but...no. Each engine will have an Isp of 800. They will each produce 60kN of thrust a piece. Isp is a measure of efficiency, so the number of engines (assuming they're the same engines) you have doesn't change it. You'll still get just as much thrust-to-propellant ratio. The difference is that you'll be sucking-it-down twice as fast, producing the same amount of thrust in half the time. You don't need higher math to understand this. Specific impulse is analogous to miles/gallon, or kilometers/liter for those who *ahem* know how to count. If you put two car engines together that had the same km/L rating, would they then start using even more fuel to get a km? No, dropping all the other messy things like friction, heat losses, drag, yadda yadda.

You're the one lagging, not the video. Anywho...intriguing. Eve has a thick atmosphere...planes and helicopters are particularly viable...hmmmmmm...*ponders that*

If the Alcubierre drive is proven to be a feasible method of travel, it's possible that the excitement that comes from exploration will push people toward exploring our solar system (at least). Big if there. If we don't kill ourselves (that's another big if), we're going to go eventually. It's the only choice for the continued survival of our species.

Is there any way to get this to produce more data on each part update? I've calculated that the time to produce a maximum-resolution map is around 986 hours (max-res file size is about 15GB, at ~767KB/s). That's over a month of always-on data collection. O.o

Parts from DSM use EEP. EEP uses the part resource system, so anything else that creates or uses the resource "Energy" should also be compatible with parts using EEP. This means anything from PowerTech will work with EEP, so you can easily use say, PowerTech panels to generate power for EEP's ion engines. That said, I still haven't looked at Zoxygene and EPS. (Bah, really should do that soon.) For what it's worth, look at this thread.

Eh, to be fair, it was about as low-budget as was possible, at a time where cutting-edge PC graphics were in Homeworld. (Actually, Homeworld came quite a bit later than the first season of B5.) That, and due to a complete screw-up in storage, none of the high-quality copies of the composite video (3D graphics and live footage) survived to be released on DVD, so the originally aired versions actually had higher-quality special effects when combined with live-action. (And there's the unfortunate fact that one episode in Season 4 is all low-quality... ).