Viewing profile — joelshep

I may be misremembering Godel's proof or misunderstanding your last paragraph, but I thought Godel's proof actually presented a specific undecidable statement. The hope then was th…

Interesting. I've had exactly the opposite experience. The Surfaces I've owned (3 so far, over the last 8 years) have been much more reliable than the other Windows laptops I've us…

Did Apollo 8 go to the moon?

Hardly. Remembering the end of 1968, when Apollo 8 made the first manned voyage out of earth's orbit, and orbited the moon: Newsman Walter Cronkite remembers the year of Apollo 8: …

You can buy the Handbook of Model Rocketry and have essentially all the knowledge that's encoded in OpenRocket or RockSim. You just lack the automated simulations and the parts cat…

Not true in the US either, in any meaningful way. Weight thresholds are different, FAA thresholds are different, allowed control systems are different, etc., etc.

But hopefully not that kind of interest. Model rocketry, as a hobby, enjoys a limited amount of regulation, at least in the US. In large part, that is because the community has bee…

I "identify" strongly as Democrat (meaning, I vote consistently, but not purely, Democrat). I've also subscribed to The Flip Side for a number of years, which will take a news stor…

This is great: thanks for sharing it. In 1983, Compute! magazine published yet another article on these opcodes: https://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/issue41/Extra_Instruc... . N…

Depends on the workload. In the past, I've worked on several workflow-based systems that performed lots of OLTP operations to drive live workflows forward, but once a workflow was …

To continue the speculation ... as a ship that size is slow to turn or halt, that seems to suggest that even if the ship hadn't suffered a power failure then it would have passed q…

In our galaxy, or anywhere? In our galaxy, potentially 1-3 times per century but there are reasons (besides probabilities being what they are) that we humans haven't actually obser…

Yes: I find "what" comments critical. Naming things is hard; getting two people to agree on the concept the name represents is harder. I write "what" comments -- usually at a class…

If God is omnipotent, surely that would include the ability to do things that we mere mortals would construe as harmful or self-defeating, wouldn't it?

It might be obvious as far as it goes, but it's also incomplete in at least two ways. One is that as tweaks and optimizations and "supplementing the system in some way" often invol…

Generally for anything other than casual viewing, the mount that the telescope rides on is generally considered most critical. You can put a modest telescope on a good quality moun…

In my experience, a decent refractor just does what it needs to do, without drama. There's no mirror to collimate, no mirror to flop. Once the imaging train is dialed in, you let i…

I think what you're paying for is minimized learning curve. If you actually want to invest the time and effort to learn the ropes, this isn't for you. If you want to go from "Whoa,…