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That's not how wifi works, it doesn't just randomly drop or become unstable unless the hardware itself is fault in which case yes, you would get disconnected.

I guess you don't own a microwave oven. ;)

When a connection becomes weak it doesn't send any less data back and forth to the client, what changes is the proportion of usable data to the proportion of redundant data for error checking and correcting, this has the effect of making the wifi connection speed appear slower, so for example if you have a wifi connection of 54mbps that means you're transmitting/receiving say, 54mbps of usable data along with 6mbps of data for error checking/correcting, when you move away from the access point and your speed drops to 10mbps you're still receiving 60mbps or whatever of data overall, but 50mbps of that is for error checking/correcting.

Er, that's not really how wifi works... it steps down to different transmission schemes when the signal/noise ratio gets too low.

But that's beside the point, because the console and the Live service don't care about the physical details of your connection. What they notice is that when your connection is interrupted (say, you turn on the microwave), packets start getting lost. Packet loss has the effect, at the TCP level, of making the connection slower, but that's because the sender's buffer fills up while it's retransmitting the old packets that were dropped. Xbox Live can't tell whether you've put your router on standby for a few seconds, or whether you're experiencing radio interference that causes all of Live's packets to be dropped for a few seconds, or whether some router anywhere in between is temporarily overloaded.

In fact, I just tried it myself: after pressing the standby button, it took 2-3 minutes before I was signed out of Live.

It's absolutely not possible to read/write the memory of modern consoles unless you get access to an execution environment where you can execute your own code (outside the limited sandbox of say, XNA).

So it's a good thing consoles are never vulnerable to buffer overflows and other expoits that let you run your own code, right? Oh wait, they are. That's how the Xbox, PSP, and Wii softmods work.

Maybe the 360 isn't vulnerable, but all we can really say is that none have been found yet.

This is why despite the console having been out since 2005, no such hack has yet been successful- all hacks have depended on detectable modifications to DVD drive firmwares and similar.

There's no inherent reason why a firmware mod would have to be detectable. The console can only check the drive's firmware by going through the drive. If the drive has been modified to lie about the contents of its own firmware, what's the console going to do about that?

CoD: MW2 certainly doesn't [have auto-aim in multiplayer] and I'm pretty sure MW and CoD5 didn't either.

COD 4 did, and from what I can tell, so do World at War and Modern Warfare 2. Maybe it's subtle enough that you don't notice it, but it's helping you nonetheless.

This is another straw man argument, pretty much everyone had an SDTV before HDTV came along

I'm not sure you know the difference between strawman and analogy.

How did a faulty power supply cause an RROD when the power supply is external and RROD represents an internal hardware fault?

RROD indicates a "general hardware failure". After several weeks,

"how Arab culture subsumed Islam and turned it into a political empire" ... you do realize that it's the (paedophile) prophet who did that. This statement of you is akin to saying that what Jesus Christ did has nothing to do with Christianity. That Krishna's actions do not have anything to do with Hinduism. That Marx and communism are totally unrelated, and anyone implying connection between Hitler and Nazism is just babbling racist nonsense meant to "hurt nazi feelings".

Which part, exactly, of islam does not support the political empire ? I am very interested in your opinion. And please, refrain from naming tiny sects that are persecuted and massacred in the muslim world. It may very well be true that Bahai islam, Sufi islam and Ahmadiyya islam have different ideas about this, but let's get real here.

Your points, when you're attacking the political culture of Islam as defined by a state, are mostly valid. But you are making an error in combining Islam as political culture and Islam as religion. Unfortunately, I will concede to you that most people, many Muslims (and Christians, and Jews) make the same mistake. We are only human after all, and definitely not perfect

Yes where would I get the idea that islam is only a totalitarian political system, literally encompassing every last action one ever takes, from being born to wiping one's ass, sitting down only in the allowed manner ? From killing any dissenters, to cleaning sandals, ... everything. Joseph Stalin would find these rules suffocating.

Feel free, in any rebuttal, to include the reason that you think you know better than all "schools" of islam. Not just one, but all of them. Furthermore, I seriously doubt you've ever even talked to a muslim. I seriously doubt you've ever even touched that most boring of books (seriously it takes all one's willpower to read even a single chapter, it's that convoluted and boring. Okay there are 2 or 3 pages that are weak versions of biblical stories at the end, and they color it just a little bit, but if you actually read it up to that point either you're studying it, or there is something wrong with you. Seriously. Reading the bible is hard, for it's a very long book indeed. But I guarantee there are a whole lot more Christians that have read the bible cover to cover than there are muslims that have read even one of the longer chapters of the quran)

Also feel free to explain how having a 9 year old girl dragged into your bedroom, an action that according to muslim texts required several slaves to accomplish, and then "having sex" with her as a 53 year old man (note that the text conspicuously doesn't say that those slaves left before the act. One that reads between the lines might think that physical restraint was required for the act, and that the actual man was incapable to provide it) is comparable to marriages between 14 year old boys and 12 year old girls. You'd even be right in pointing out that the paedophile prophet's actions weren't that strange for a man that probably had visited brothels of the Roman empire, and that he was probably not the only guy in the Roman empire doing it. However, it is, was, and always will be a vile, reprehensible action and any religion that condones it is equally vile and repr

I've been to Google and found it down for a few minutes at least twice and there are numerous instances where gmail has been unavailable.

Gmail downtimes, while frequent enough and long enough to be annoying, have been gmail-specific downtimes, not total google failures. Google search downtimes were measured in 2007 by pingdom[1]. I can't find anything more recent, but it doesn't appear anyone thinks it is worse, otherwise they'd certainly write about it. You must do a lot of searches to notice 30-40 minutes of downtime per year.

If Google goes down for a few seconds, you hit refresh and blame your ISP. If, for example, the telephone company's accounting system goes down for a few seconds then they lose hundreds of thousands of dollars.

If your phone service goes down during a call, you hang up and call again. If Google's accounting system that counts all charged ad clicks goes down for a few seconds, they lose thousands of dollars[2,3]. In fact if there's even a delay, adsense publishers will notice[4]. You are comparing apples and oranges in your statement because you mix the user view with the company's global view. In reality the two "utilities" are pretty similar with large downtime cost for billing and in the user behavior for short outages.

Btw, if you know a telephone company that makes $2T/year, please let me know so I can invest in them. AT&T makes "only" $124B, or ~$3900/sec.

[1] http://royal.pingdom.com/2007/09/26/google-availability-differs-greatly-between-countries/
[2] http://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=GOOG&annual
[3] $21.7E9/year / (365.24*24*60*60 sec/year) = ~$688/sec; a few seconds could be $2000.
[4] http://www.webmasterworld.com/google_adsense/3929862.htm

The initial NYT article about the acquisition said it was only talent related, while a more recent Reuters article has the following quote:

A source familiar with the matter said the iPod, iPhone and Mac maker is seeking new ways to expand iTunes to move it beyond being a predominantly download service for songs. The source asked not to be named.

"Apple recognizes that the model is going to evolve into a streaming one and this could probably propel iTunes to the next level," said the person.

The truth is, nobody really knows what Apple is up to. Which is, of course, just how Apple likes it. I wouldn't put it past them to have deliberately leaked a couple of conflicting stories just to keep everyone guessing.

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20091206112730AAYSucH

If you are posting things supporting the Iranian protestors, better watch what you order out - portable leafy greens might be the death of you.

No reason they couldn't take the tactic abroad, and it's a lot less traceable (thus deniable) than Russian exotic uranium killings.

Yahoo does have some built-in market share that'll let them struggle on for a while as long as their search isn't terrible, which is what they might be hoping for from the Bing backend. They have huge installed bases of users of lots of their other services (email, mailing lists, now Flickr), and the Yahoo search bar shows up at the top of the page for some of those services (though not, at least for now, on Flickr)--- check out the top of the Yahoo Groups page, for example. If they can keep those services all steady with reasonably large user bases, they'll have a decent stream of search users even if nobody purposely goes to search.yahoo.com.

techonoly & chillern in interweb has litature skillz.

Source(s) - http://ask.yahoo.com//

http://www.jslint.com/ or http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/compressor/ (with -v set) will pick up these types of bugs (in lieu of a compiler).

If you have a point it's still lost on me. Even if they are hiding their arms they don't get to approach a merchant ship without communicating their intent. If they somehow manage to sneak aboard (particularly likely at night and in bad weather) then the crew still needs arms to be able to fight back.

I just can't comprehend this opposition to giving people who are threatened with violent acts the means to defend themselves against those acts. It's a fairly safe assumption that all of the armchair quarterbacks here have never found themselves in a situation where they were assaulted and/or violated and lacked the means to defend themselves.

I've love to see the merchant sailors of the world unite against this and stop doing their jobs until they are allowed to carry arms. The economy would grind to a halt and the hoplophobes would cave in short order. Unfortunately that will never happen because the majority of sailors are working under flags of convenience and have no rights. It's worth noting that most American flagged ships that have to ply those waters are now carrying arms to defend themselves. Funny how having the ability to fight back makes it harder for criminal thugs to operate with impunity, isn't it?

Of course if a company does hand out titles too much then you'll end up with a situation like this. Me I don't call myself an "IT guy" as I am quite happy being what I am-A PC fixit guy and system builder. I look at it no different than electrician or plumber. Folks break machines, or need new machines, so they come to me.

I think the reason the word "IT" rubs this guy the wrong way is it is a catch all phrase, but as far as I know it has always been, but that is why most are not JUST an "IT Guy" but a programmer, engineer, or guys like me that actually do "fix windoze". Oh yeah and bite me on the fix windoze remark. I'd love to see this turkey spend some time trying to get rid of a seriously nasty infection where he can NOT wipe the thing because they have data shotgunned all over the damned drive, or get to see a nasty pron bug that spews crap like bukkake all over the damned screen be the first thing HE had to look at first thing in the morning. You know, nobody respects the plumber either until their toilet is clogged. May your family get rootkitted!

1. go on walking tours so you can see all the side streets and stuff. http://www.walks.com/
2. there's a huge geek community, check out http://www.geekery.in/london/ http://upcoming.yahoo.com/place/.2P4je.dBZgMyQ--
3. museums are free, check out the imperial war museum, V&A, british museum
4. starbucks has a deal where you can get wifi with the purchase of a starbucks gift card, pub often have wifi access too
5. use http://www.famouslocations.com/ to find spots from different films (just realized the filmed part of eyes wide shut 6.outside my place... creepy)
6. eat indian food, brick lane is famous for it.

AT&T market cap: 159.27 billion USD
Verizon market cap: 89.85 billion USD
T-Mobile market cap: 42.96 billion Euro (64.25 billion USD)
Sprint market cap: 10.79 billion USD

AT&T market cap: 159.27 billion USD
Verizon market cap: 89.85 billion USD
T-Mobile market cap: 42.96 billion Euro (64.25 billion USD)
Sprint market cap: 10.79 billion USD

AT&T market cap: 159.27 billion USD
Verizon market cap: 89.85 billion USD
T-Mobile market cap: 42.96 billion Euro (64.25 billion USD)
Sprint market cap: 10.79 billion USD

AT&T market cap: 159.27 billion USD
Verizon market cap: 89.85 billion USD
T-Mobile market cap: 42.96 billion Euro (64.25 billion USD)
Sprint market cap: 10.79 billion USD

People interested in this area may find the 'Motion Capture' Yahoo group useful.

Its website is located here:
http://movies.groups.yahoo.com/group/motioncapture/

A recent interesting message from the group (edited to evade ./ Junk filter):

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Brad Friedman
Date: Sun, Nov 15, 2009 at 9:35 AM
Subject: [motioncapture] releasing some optitrack open source software and code
To: mocap list

Hey all.

Been a while. I've been rather busy with other things.

I'm releasing some OptiTrack related open source software and code.

Two simple modules have been released. One is LGPL and one is BSD.

http://www.fie.us/kinearx

Its all alpha level stuff. But its working well enough for me to move on to other things. I feel its worth open sourcing something that runs, and does useful things. Even if its not feature complete and production tested.

Its really for developers more than end users for now. But this list is about developing tools. So there you go.

My theory is simple: This particular part of working with OT cameras is kinda generic and somewhat dull. I'd rather have an open source backend that we can all maintain together, than have to maintain it completely by myself. The windows app is LGPL. The example client, is BSD. Therefore, it should be good for open source and commercial developers who, like me, also want to collaborate on the dull backend and spend more time on other aspects of mocap systems. The projects are separated by a nice simple binary data stream layer to make sure their licenses don't conflict.

Two main features of interest:

1. Cameras operating on different computers can be synchronized by looping the sync cable through. The existing Arena and PointCloud tools from NP don't do this on their backend.

2. Development is jail broken out of the PC environment by the binary protocol. The example script is written in python and runs on OSX and linux, for example.

Further work to be done:

1. Better support of OT cameras other than the V100r1. That's the only camera I have, so that's what I know is supported. C120 and V100r2 are something I can't really confirm function of. But I'd like to.

2. Occasional sending of a GMT timestamp from the 2d servers, interleaved with the frames, for sanity checking purposes and helping with situations where the sync cable may not be working fully.

3. Switch between the mass marker mode, and COM object mode. This should make the grayscale and masking features of the camera work again (I think being in mass object mode disables them).

Feel free to e-mail me with questions or queries.

Brad Friedman
VFX - Consultant - Mocap
http://www.fie.us/

Google market cap: 183.94 billion

Comcast market cap: 42.48 billion

Google market cap: 183.94 billion

Comcast market cap: 42.48 billion

Under the present circumstances, such methodical research is not possible. A nuclear-powered spaceship, like the one proposed by Russia, would still take months to make the round-trip to and from Mars.

Humankind's only hope is the development of a hyper-drive (a. k. a. warp-drive) engine based on the science discovered by Burkhard Heim. The Pentagon is currently exploring the construction of such an engine.

Guess it's time to get a Relakks account. Basically you use a VPN account which gives you some random Swedish IP address. This will keep you off the radar of those collecting IP addresses for a while.

Not related to them or anything, I was just a satisfied customer for a few months. I gave it up when I realized I almost never downloaded movies and music anymore.

Slashdotted.
yahoo cache
google cache

Did you invest in this one?

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=LNUX&t=my&l=off&z=l&q=l&c=

People will NEVER pay for the long term lockup of violent offenders

Stop spending ~$43,000 per prisoner to house them in Club Fed and revert prison to what it should be: Three square meals and the chance to break big rocks into little rocks. Stop locking up non-violent druggies (you'll note that I was talking about violent crimes in my previous post) and use the free space/money to lock up violent criminals that actually pose a threat to the rest of us.

A shoplifter deserves a shot at rehabilitation. An armed robber does not. Both sought unearned material gain -- but the latter was willing to threaten violence against his fellow human beings in order to obtain it. Once you demonstrate that you are willing to do that then I don't think you deserve to live among the rest of us. You are no better than a rapid dog and deserve to be treated accordingly.

Their stock seems pretty flat to me. Especially when you compare it to Amazon's.

A byproduct of CANDU reactors is Helium-3.

I'm not the first to note this, evidently.

Yup:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091122/ap_on_sc/sci_climate_09_post_kyoto

There is quite a bit of money to be made as an insurance provider. Enough that it would be attractive even if it wasn't publicly traded

So true. Profit margins for the health insurance industry are running at an astounding 3.4%. Right around the same margin run by airlines and grocery stores. Why would I put money into my 4% money market fund when I could make so much more, er, less, dealing with all the hassles of running a health insurance company. Well, I guess the huge amounts of respect I get from the rest of society might make up for some of that shortfall.

http://biz.yahoo.com/p/sum_qpmd.html

This is a HUGE part of the current problem in the States with health insurance.

It was already pointed out this incident is in Canada. Moving on...

Health insurance companies are not doctors.

No, but in the US they typically have doctors on staff.

You can't make a diagnosis by looking at pictures on someone's facebook account.

Congratulations, you got one right.

They teach you that in medical school, I think.

I assume that is a first year course? You gotta weed out the slow ones somehow.

Frankly, I think anyone who works for an organization as corrupt as an American health insurance company, has it coming, because nobody who works for one can possibly claim ignorance to the crap that goes on with them.

You didn't go into much detail but it certainly can't be the profits since Farm and construction machinery, Tupperware, the railroads, Hershey sweets, Yum food brands and Yahoo are all more profitable than the health insurance industry: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091025/ap_on_go_co/us_fact_check_health_insurance I would start with the financial institutions that nearly plunged the US into another great depression. Also at the top of my list would be the companies that poison people by contanimating the air/ground/water. Companies like Wal-Mart with illegal business practices that take advantage of workers is also a good start. And don't get me started on the telco's and cable TV. And yes, the employees can claim ignorance because of some little things called federal laws that protect patient's information. The guy managing the routers does not know about Ms. Anderson's implants (ok, bad example but a lovely mental image). Heck, I know an Enron programmer who thought they were visionary until the wheels fell off.

61,000Q3
39,000Q2
69,000Q1
80,000 Q4

Here's a company that paid 250,000,000 dollars in taxes in the last fiscal year (and that's only income tax) -- and you're complaining that they aren't paying their share? How much would you say is "fair" for them to pay?

Yahoo Pipes works acceptably for this task.
Example: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=VsavzdaC3RGH9sTVrLQIDg

Nothing except for possibly lots of Uranium/Plutonium for use in space exploration, Rare Earth minerals (which may causes wars/world war to be started in the next 5 years), the ability to launch a number of sats at high speeds cheaply, a new tourist location for Billionaire (who would then fund a lot of this), New Robotics that come back to Earth and on to mars, the ability to test equipment prior to sending to mars, the ability to put lasers, rods from gods, etc if needed, or even better yet, stop others from doing it, etc, etc, etc.

BUT, hey, it is silly waste of resource to the idiots that think that they will solve all of the World's need by focusing HERE. Right?

When I setup my first postfix daemon, I failed. Took my days. One day, it seemed like it was working, but wasn't accepting username and password logins. I went to bed, didn't stop postfix.

The next day I get an email from my colo asking why some of my IPs are being blacklisted. The colo apparently got notified that two of my IP addresses are spammers. I looked at my logs and sure enough, I stupidly let postfix run as an open smtp server and some guy started using it to send out spam.

So I stopped that, but now what? Yahoo won't accept my emails. Craigslist won't accept my emails. Hotmail moves them into the junk folder. Yahoo had the best help.

http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/mail/postmaster/errors/;_ylt=ArX8PxnGVabUYKQmtOrSQN5vMiV4

So the error message I was getting from Yahoo was related to spamhaus. I stopped postfix, finally got it up and running properly with authentication, and sent an email to the SBL list guys ( http://www.spamhaus.org/sbl/delistingprocedure.html ) and got delisted pretty quickly.

Sending emails to Yahoo now worked fine. Other places were slower to realize that I was not a spammer, but all in all, it took about 6 months for the dust to settle, and a few more emails to various places to say "hey! I am not a spammer!".

For a major business, this can be a problem, but these lists aren't private. When doing research on where to create your new home on the internet, checking to see if they are blacklisted anywhere first would be a prudent thing to do.

I'm more concerned with them taking fox news seriously and giving them validation despite their neck-deep role engineering the 9/12 teabagger protests and deliberate manipulation of footage to mislead the public into thinking there are more americans opposed to democratic agendas than there actually are.

I don't appreciate them giving validation to a network which manufactures the news stories they cover, either through acting as a political action committe and then covering their own protest rallies, through lies of omission and quotes out of context, or through lies of manipulation.

Slanted analysis is one thing, but you never see the leftist MSNBC outright fabricating propaganda.

And yes Americans will fight in hand-to-hand combat using their hunting rifles if that's what it takes. As Churchill said in the last war: "We shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender."

Funny thing, Churchill said that in Europe. You should visit a major European city and see how well they're defending, both their own (I mean physically) and their own values. Even Churchill's own London. But France, and specifically Paris. Some days you would say it's under siege (you see the flames burning every night in a whole lot of cities).

I hope you're right, that in the US it's not happening everywhere like in Europe.

I seriously doubt Obama will *let* Americans fight though, he'll set the army on the people defending themselves, not on the enemy. At least if the choice is between pretending nothing's wrong while people die and being politically incorrect.

Anyone spotted him at Fort Hood yet ? No ? Oh but at the celebration of the fall of the Berlin wall then ? No again ? At the remembrance of the ardens offensive then ? No ?

He did, of course, defend, even praise, the "tolerant" lack of judgement and general idiocy that made the army ignore all warning signs for the Fort Hood massacre though. But don't worry, Obama's made sure that we'll see more of that tolerance. You know that tolerance that lead to at least 13 corpses.

And if you think it's unfair that shooting is caused by islam, blame the shooter. He FIRST shouted "allahu akbar", then started killing randomly.

Not that there's any doubt all "progressives" will punish me for saying this. It's funny how people who are supposedly comitted to destroying dogma do that. You know, when it violates their dogma.

Our president loves political correctness more than he loves life. Too many Americans "secretly" (ahem) hate our military and in fact support the killing.

--
"muslims love death more than you love life, and that's why we will win"
Major Nidal Hasan - 2007, Walter Reed Hospital. He was making a presentation about how muslim soldiers in the American military must not be forced to fight other muslims. He included the reason : if they didn't "adverse events would happen" (his words, not mine)

Salient detail : this is a quote that was originally made by the (paedophilic thief and massmurderer) muslim prophet muhammad, in a letter to the emperor of the eastern roman empire. Whatever your beliefs are, in this specific comment, history would prove him right.

You are trying to make it seem as if Congress has no power to do anything other than that which is explicitly granted in the Constitution, which is comically untrue.

Incorrect. It is _absolutely_ true. Look up any quotes from the founding fathers. Many of them are listed here: http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080817135306AAhmfqX

The founding fathers meant for the general welfare clause to act as a _restriction_ on the government, not a blank check. It's without a doubt one of the widest and most grievous misinterpretations of our laws that continues to be spread about as "truth" today.

Think of it this way. If the founding fathers were truly hand-waving the federal government to do whatever they want, why did they then spend the time and effort to specifically enumerate a list of "granted powers"? These were men longing for independence and freedom, not people aching for massive government interference in their lives. The fact your post got moderated as high as you did is a reflection on the ignorance of the American populace and is an absolute travesty.

I hate to tell you, but having kiddie porn ON YOUR COMPUTER is fairly good evidence you've done something wrong.

I hate to tell you, but that's not at all accurate.

Normally, you can say that the "virus framed me" line is akin to "the dog ate my homework". Unfortunately in this case, it really, really did do what they claimed on this one- and your line of reasoning is bogus. ANYTHING can happen, including having someone plant it on your machine without your knowledge- especially if you're using Windows as an OS.

"As a brit in this damn place i can tell you its not legal unless you have a licence, which covers shotguns and gun clubs, even airsoft guns are now illegal to buy unless you are a club member and skirmish. Criminals have more rights than straight ppl here now on the protecting your family front , you cant touch them if they break in your home, they can sue you for assault" - http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20071014223548AAfrOyQ

"Yes you can legally own a gun if you have a permit, but you have to prove you have legitimate reason for having a gun and this is usually because its needed in your line of work - ie you are a policemen, soldier, farmer, member of a gun club etc. Its very, very hard to get a gun."

"The 2012 Olympics

Following the awarding of the 2012 Olympic Games to London, the government announced that special dispensation would be granted to allow the various shooting events to go ahead, as had been the case previously for the 2002 Commonwealth Games. However, it was still illegal for Britain's top pistol shooters to train in England, Scotland or Wales. As a result, British shooters currently spend 20 to 30 days a year training in Switzerland, and receive no public sports funding because their events are considered illegal in the UK" - wikipedia

Gun Control's Twisted Outcome (Restricting firearms has helped make England more crime-ridden than the U.S.)
http://reason.com/archives/2002/11/01/gun-controls-twisted-outcome

How is babby formed????? how is babby formed? how girl get pragnent? Yahoo Answers

From: "[ExI] Thoughts on Space based solar power"
http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/2008-November/046620.html
"""
I spent a long time around 2003 and 2004 on the SSI email list (now on yahoo
groups if you want to look at the archives) explaining why space-based solar
power will not in any likely time frame be of any value on Earth. :-)
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/ssi_list/
And I want to make it clear I was a SSI Senior Associate (five year pledge
of money) back in the 1980s, and even took a (intro Physics) course from
Gerry O'Neill. So this in not just a casual disagreement. I am very sad that
the Space Studies Institute even now pushes an outdated agenda (well, now
they are moving to scaring people with asteroids, to the extent they are
still operating). I feel if Gerry O'Neill was around now he might agree with
this analysis of the current prospects for space-based power in the next few
decades, since he always was an adaptable and innovative guy, even if,
unfortunately, ultimately an unsuccessful businessperson with GeoStar and
LAWN with which he hoped to fund space habitation. I think by coupling the
two -- a desire to build space habitations coupled with economic arguments
for space solar power (or even other space activities) -- that one may miss
out on sooner realizing the dream of space habitation done for its own sake
(as a hobby).

The core points of the argument I advanced there:

* About a third to one half the cost of residential electric service is
maintaining transmission lines. So, at best, space solar even if *free* at
the ground station will be at best one-third the cost of utility power is
now at the home meter. As the costs of home power generation fall from
advanced manufacturing, the cost of home solar power (or wind, or
cogeneration) will drop below that cost at some point for self-contained
homes producing all or most of their own power, making space solar power
obsolete for home use. Since space solar power will initially be expensive,
it is non-viable right now. And since the cost of solar panels (like
Nanosolar's) is dropping way faster than the cost of space operations, and
since solar space satellites have a twenty to thirty year time horizon for
significant production, they are a non-starter and too risky investment
comparatively. Things might have been different in the 1970s, but it is
thirty years later. Also, one can make an argument for limited solar power
for large commercial facilities producing aluminum or liquid fuels or doing
laser launching, but that is only likely to be worth doing once we already
have a space presence since then only the incremental costs will need to be
paid, rather than expect solar power to pay to develop a space
infrastructure as O'Neill and others proposed (and people still propose).
I'm sure one can look hard at situations where transmission costs are
minimized, but this cost of transmission argument is a very deep one and
I've never seen it rigorously discussed. We know how to do solar on the
ground, there are ways to store the energy at night (molten salts, ever
improving batteries, pumping water up hill, compressed air, production of
synthetic liquid fuels, production of hydrogen, a superconducting world wide
grid backbone, etc.), and there are complementary technologies like wind
power and cogeneration by burning biomass that together with solar produce
fairly reliable power (as well as a lot of local hands-on jobs in the short
term). And there are organizations promoting R&D to make this all even better:
http://www.google.com/corporate/green/energy/

* A rebuttal to this is

Speaking of bad car analogies

No, not LoJack, it's more like you're buying a 2005 SUV especially because you know it has an OnStar system on board, and then a few months later, GM decides to change the format on you, and you basically have no recourse (and no one willing to buy that truck from you, because by now everybody knows about the discontinuation).

First generation Zune owners and Walmart DRM music customers should know basically what I'm talking about. You don't own the music you buy, and if you want to keep on listening to DRM music you've already purchased -- it means you may have to repurchase your same music again and again.

http://answers.yahoo.com/

and the end all most awesome/ most depressing question ever asked there:

"how is babby formed, how girl get pragnent"

TFA seems to be about trying to show that George W. Bush was actually smart. Without arguing the actually merits either way, I'd say his mediocre grade-point average (77 according to http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=1006041514803 - to be fair, Kerry and Gore weren't much better), failed businesses (http://www.villagevoice.com/2002-07-09/news/george-bush-failed-corporate-crook/1, http://alaric3rh.home.sprynet.com/science/bceo.html), and legendary misspoken-isms, I'd say the researcher is fighting a losing battle...

Although, here are the stats for distrowatch.net:
Top 15 of 879 Total User Agents
# Hits User Agent
1 2578 5.27% msnbot/2.0b (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)
2 1884 3.85% curl/7.18.0 (i486-pc-linux-gnu) libcurl/7.18.0 OpenSSL/0.9.8g zlib/1.2.3.3 libidn/1.1
3 874 1.79% msnbot/1.1 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)
4 850 1.74% Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)
5 833 1.70% Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp/3.0; http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp)
6 721 1.47% Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.2) Gecko/20090729 Firefox/3.5.2
7 689 1.41% Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)
8 658 1.35% Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.13) Gecko/2009080315 Ubuntu/9.04 (jaunty) Firefox/3.0.13
9 612 1.25% Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.14) Gecko/2009090216 Ubuntu/9.04 (jaunty) Firefox/3.0.14
10 567 1.16% Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)
11 415 0.85% Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)
12 394 0.81% Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_5_8; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.3 Safari/531.9
13 351 0.72% Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; es-AR; rv:1.9.1.3) Gecko/20090824 Firefox/3.5.3
14 348 0.71% Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0)
15 325 0.66% Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727)

which states that curl gets more usage than both firefox AND ie6...

I wasnt referring to people vs corporations, I was referring to gov't vs Corp ownership, how many corporations do you know that are even half as old as the US, and we are a baby amongst the nations.

First, nations change their form of government, this past century we had nations change their government at least twice. Llyod's of London was founded in 1688. Though not older the Insurance Company of North America was founded in 1792 and the Hartford Insurance Group in 1810. The Insurance of Houses from Loss by Fire incorporated in 1768. The Hudson's Bay Company in Canada was founded in 1670.

I'm sure if I look longer I can find more corporations that are as old.

Falcon

Courts also ruled that tomatoes are a fruit, my point is courts can be really stupid.

Tomatoes are fruits. Tomatoes themselves contain the seeds for reproduction, therefore they are fruits.

Falcon

These are some ways to deal with increasing joblessness, even if our economy recovers for those who still have jobs or money, which will be explored in more depth over time:

• temporary measures like unemployment insurance and retraining funds, and when those fail, letting people live with relatives who still have jobs or be homeless (the USA now has one million homeless schoolchildren, an amount that has doubled in the last two years);
• government public works like in the 1930s (infrastructure, arts, research, medicine, etc.);
• a basic income for everyone, essentially Social Security and Medicaid for all with no means testing;
• improved local subsistence like with 3D printing and organic gardening;
• a p2p gift economy (like Wikipedia and Debian GNU/Linux);
• a shorter work week (like tried in France);
• rethinking work to be more fun so it is done as play;
• alternative currencies or other forms of exchange like barter or more formal rationing;
• increasing advertising to entice people into more debt (one cause of the current economic crisis as the debt bubble burst);
• intentionally producing shoddy merchandise or things with planned obsolescence, perhaps encouraged by promoting faddism in the culture;
• more prisons (employs guards and keeps people out of the labor pool);
• more schooling (employs guards/teachers and keeps people out of the labor pool) while suppressing true education; and
• more war (employs guards/soldiers, blows up and wastes abundance, and kills or disables workers to keep them out of the labor pool).

Likely we will see a mix of all those in the future, and in fact, a mix of all those is what we have now (not that the last five options of advertising, faddism, schooling, prison, and war are recommended, even as our society currently relies on them heavily to destroy abundance and create guarding jobs). This web site will go into the details of all this over time. That list is defining the landscape of a jobless recovery, showing connections between things that dont usually seem connected. Like for example, why President Obama just suggested the school year should be longer while our best educators say compulsory school as we know it should disappear entirely.

The important thing to remember is that joblessness is not necessarily a bad thing. It means people have more time for family, friends, hobbies, and volunteerism. What is bad about formal un

The author really believes that China is rewarding intellects? According to wikipedia, China spent $40Billion on the 2008 Olympics.

I don't see intellects in any First world country making the same money as athletes. Nike spends on sponsorships $255 to $260million a year and spent $143.4 million on advertising in the first nine months of 2008. Note that Nike is a $31Billion company.

In comparison, the National Science Foundation received a total of $6.49 billion for FY09.

As a kid growing up? I don't recall any commercials saying "I wanna be like Stephen [Hawking]" or kids beating up other kids for some intellectual device, but they were sure beating each other up for a pair of Air Jordans.

Anybody else ever notice that the only commercials on TV for Educational Institutions (besides community or trade schools) are during college football games? Those commercials are only for the two schools that are playing. There's a commercial every 5minutes for sneakers, Under Armor shirts, Fitness equipment, sports drinks or sporting events. (As a side note, anybody recall the last time you saw an advertisement for Educational Software, besides Rosetta Stone? But there's a commercial every hour for some new XBOX/PS3/Wii game).

Intellectuals are enablers of other people to go onto great success. I guarantee you there were a ton of intellectuals that designed the bike, software to track, study the technique of Lance Armstrong's cycling career and victories in the Tour de France. But other than the brand, Trek, those big brained people will never be known, nor will someone pay them $50m in endorsements.

Btw: It's not just athletes vs intellectuals. Not all intellectuals are compensated equally either. I maintain the storage environment for a very large mainframe environment for a household WallStreet financial firm. Over a PB of online FICON disk much of it synchronously replicated to a remote disaster recovery site, and I can assure that my bonus is not even close to that of an entry level trader. I'm sure I could do a lot more damage than that 28yr old MBA.

No true, there was was a link to this AP story on Monday.

Delta IV Heavy launches now.

Yeah, but it's not a cheap rocket either. I read the NRO paid a billion for their launch.

You'd be better off planning lunar missions with the Delta IV Heavy than with Ares V.

According to this Ares V is being designed with 7x the lift of the Delta IV. So you'd have to run 7:1 Delta IV's:Ares V, and there'd be some things just to big to lift.

My take is that four to five Delta IV launches could put up the Apollo mission, for example.

That seems likely, but we're trying to build a moon base here, so what does it matter if we could do Apollo?

And if you have redundant copies of the various components (command, service, and lunar modules) as well as the crew

Right, so that's the other trick - the Delta IV is (theoretically, granted) twice as likely to kill the crew. I'm not impatient enough for that.

It's about bloody time they got this thing started

Actually, it's past time.

NASA test flight delayed, bad weather still looms

By MARCIA DUNN, AP Aerospace Writer Marcia Dunn, Ap Aerospace Writer - 59 mins ago

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - NASA's newest rocket is on the verge of blasting off on a test flight, but minor problems are causing last-minute delays.

The Ares I-X rocket is set to lift off Tuesday morning. But forecasters are monitoring upper-level winds and clouds that could delay the experimental flight. It's already 1 1/2 hours late because of extra time needed for the countdown and minor communication system trouble.

This is the first step in NASA's effort to return astronauts to the moon.

The flight will last two minutes. Parachutes will drop the first-stage booster into the Atlantic for recovery. The upper portion of the rocket -- all fake parts -- will fall uncontrolled into the ocean.

NASA expects to learn a lot, even if it's for another type of rocket. The White House is re-evaluating the human spaceflight program.