Slashdot Mirror
Astronauts, Robots to Save Hubble
BungoMan85 writes "Astronauts who serviced the Hubble Space Telescope, among others, feel that NASA's administrator Sean O'Keefe shouldn't be too quick to abandon the now 14 year old space telescope because of safety concerns arising from the Columbia disaster." And an anonymous reader writes "At the insistance of congress, NASA is looking for a way to save the Hubble. "It's the most unpopular decision I could have made," Sean O'Keefe said of his decision to cancel the shuttle mission planned to fix Hubble. He has authorized his engineers to pursue the possiblity of a robotic rescue mission. This could be a great opportunity for private industry contractors."
Spend minimal costs, but we need to move on to bigger and better technologies. We are definitely capable of a better telescope, and we should concentrate on getting a new one out there.
Who's the hottest editor?
Cum Taco
Michael
Timothy
CowboyNeal
Other
Let's say you're sitting at a Starbucks, drinking some coffee. You hear a song over the speakers you happen to like. All you have to do is call out: "Could I get this on a CD, please?" They burn you the CD. On your way out (or right then) you pick it up... It works perfectly together...
After all, Legolas's antics were not far off....
The article states that the Australian authorities are unable to charge him, indicating that he has done nothing illegal in his country of residence and the country where the act was carried out (Australian server,.au domain). Many Americans have "broken Norwegian law", by allowing Norwegians to download hardcore porn from American servers. Should they all be extradited? Your country and laws are not above anybody elses. The fact that some of you clearly think so sickens and frightens me. If we are to go by the logic put forth by some of you, we should all be extradited to China (if not North Korea)... Sure you want that?
I was going to send the webmaster an email saying that the hotmail/msn services were down, but I couldn't get into my hotmail to send it. What do people do in these kinds of situations?
I once read an interview with comic book author Alan Moore in which the interviewer asked him how he felt about his comics being "ruined" by dismal, piece-of-crap movie adaptations (League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and the like).
He responded. "Ruined my books? No, they're fine, they're right over there on the shelf."
I feel the same way about this. Certainly it has every chance of being a dismal, laughable production, but the original source material has survived worse lambasting already at the hands of the Harvard Lampoon and a thousand poor imitators writing ten-book doorstop epics in homage to Tolkien. The original LOTR material is going to be just fine.
Because SQL Server 2000 is pretty much the best database around for the price.
Who needs all that integrated.NET stuff anyway?
I'm feeling like I could be the 6 trillion dollar man any year now... between this, powered exoskeletal legs, I'll be a super sapper in no time. I wonder how much of this my beloved US Army has actually looked into.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again:
Microsoft should not be allowed to sell Windows with any additional apps whatsoever.
With GNAA/Linux you have different distributions, why can't Windows work on the same principle?
You don't get Mandrake saying "Oh, we're not going to put into our distro, why should we put other people's apps in our distro's?"
The whole point of distributions is that you get loads of apps from loads of developers, and you get to select exactly what you want from the best available apps.
Having Windows distributions is the only way I see of overcoming Microsoft's anti-competitive monopoly.
Ummm how about we use this to monitor all the athleets to see if any are using "performance enhancing drugs". it's a monitoring not enhancing thing
We already read the same exact thing, but in different words and headline over a week ago. This new article brings nothing new to the table except for a slightly misleading headline.
The's forum.**
** - Not that a 15 year old is less intelligent than anyone else, just young people tend to not have their heads glued on straight when it comes to business and law. Wisdom takes time to build.
Forget mapping it, actually play in it! That complex is just screaming out to be used as a paintball/laser tag arena. Imagine the orange warning lights spinning around and a computerised female voice 'Thirty seconds till missile launch' over the sound system.
Hell, with the strength of the pound against the dollar even I might buy it! $3,950,000 that's like, what, 2 grand of my money? (just getting one back for the Canadians)
It has become clear to me that we probably need new IP laws for an age where copying is so easy. The current set were drafted when widespread copying was difficult, and accepted that certain infringements would happen. We can now copy so much so easily, and prevent copying so easily, that I think we should look again at the law, and see whether some small rights should accrue to the user. What's your view on this?
I agree! It used to be that the average mom & pop or even home enthusiast could purchase the "decoding" machines or the books that translated the engine light codes. Those days ended around 1992, I believe. As a car enthusiast and do-it-yourselfer, it's irritating as hell to have to pay an exorbitant fee to some dealer just to tell me what the computer THINKS is wrong with my car. 9 times out of 10, it's just some sensor somewhere that is malfunctioning and needs replacing. Usually, if the sensor weren't there, the car would run fine, too. I'll take my good-old v8 any day over cars with 50 million sensors that go bad.
Congress to Automakers: "G1bb0rz u5 j00r l337 c0d3x0r5555!"
Many distributions ship with software such as XMMS, mplayer and the gimp. Should Mandrake, SuSE, Debian and the like be fined for carrying this software?
First: no one of those distributions has a de facto monopoly in the OS market and it's trying to abuse that position to get the monopoly in other markets, such as the media players one.
Second: on the average GNAA/Linux distro, you have twenty different text editors, a dozen media players, and another dozen graphic manipulation programs.
So, your is, indeed, a non sequitur.
just need to learn to spell and to ytype accuratly. -- QED - Quite Easily Done
<Teal'c> Indeed </Teal'c>
This person has not set foot in the US.
Are you saying that if I sit off-shore and beam "illega"l materials over US airwaves, that I should be arrested and tried, even though I'm not a US citizen and I was in international waters when I did the braodcasting?
Funny, 'cause the US does that all the time... we put ships and aircraft near "evil" countries and beam in locally illegal content in an attempt to incite the population to rebel.
One of the first cases of this was when Tom's Hardware (then only a startup site) reviewed a Riva TNT and said it was twice as fast as 3DFX voodoo (obviously untrue, but it's unknown if Nvidia paid him anything to say this). Eventually 3DFX picked up on this and demanded that Tom changes it, which he did.
But the damage was already done.
RTFA. You're lightyears away from what it's about.
Correction - Neptune was farther from Pluto from January 21, 1979 to Feb. 11, 1999 but at this time Pluto is farther from the sun than Neptune.
Of course, there's debate as to whether Pluto-Charon is a planet with a moon, or a double planet...
- Thomas;
For those things there is Mailinator.
Throwaway accounts should never be, out of all places, registered on Hotmail.com. They suspend your account if you don't login for 30 days. At least Yahoo!Mail or other free alternatives let you forget the account for few months and not get penalized for it.
Correction - Neptune was farther from Pluto from January 21, 1979 to Feb. 11, 1999 but at this time Pluto is farther from the sun than Neptune.
Of course, there's debate as to whether Pluto-Charon is a planet with a moon, or a double planet...
- Thomas;
Of course, it seems a bit overboard to use GNAA/Linux for something that's only running one process. I've got an old P75 laptop (and it only uses a cord, no brick, too!), and it has an 8.4"x6.3"x640x480x16-bit screen, and an 810MB HDD. It'll run FreeDOS just fine, with a VESA TSR and LxPic (designed for HPLX palmtops, but works great on just about anything that runs DOS). After all, it does fairly well with Win95 (except with only 16MB RAM, it's dog slow). Flip the screen around, devise a latch, make a frame around it, and you've got a good picture frame. I suggest NOT matting it, as the choice of mat depends on the picture, and if it's changing pictures...
Starbucks reportedly to offer music burning service in up to 2,500 stores: The system will allow customers to have CDs burned while they wait; eventually, it will also allow downloads of music over Wi-Fi, the article in BusinessWeek says.
Starbucks demanded a T-1 (1.544 Mbps in each direction) digital service infrastructure from its first hotspot partner, MobileStar, as well as its second, T-Mobile. I've speculated for a while on how this high-speed network could be used to cache material in each Starbucks, like movie and music downloads.
This latest project sounds somewhat misguided for the reason cited by the Forrester analyst in the article: Your typical barista may be great at making espresso but is not in a position to fix the broken CD burner.
My cousin Steven was involved almost 20 years ago with a company called Personics. The company had worked out a catalog licensing deal with more than 70 labels from the largest down to some independents to allow them to offer custom mix tapes for about a buck a song. This was a reasonable price in those days. The system had a few thousand songs mastered onto CD-ROMs stored in a special employee-operated CD-ROM changer behind the counter. An employee would punch in your choices, and the system created a high-speed cassette tape dub.
The company failed for two primary reasons: the hardware was proprietary, meaning that engineers had to fly around the country to fix it when it inevitably had glitches; and the catalog they offered too small because labels balked at including their most popular stuff for fear of cannibalizing pre-recorded CD and tape sales. (Price, my cousin reports, was not a problem: many customers were willing to pay even more, he noted to me after this item was originally posted.)
If Starbucks creates the expectation of an easy process that's always available and then isn't available even part of the time at any given store, they lose their audience. Starbucks makes its money from processing a high volume of custom drinks--you don't want to distract from that. CD burners aren't that difficult to keep operating, but a failure rate that's a fraction of that experienced by typical home and business users could be a dramatic problem in a high-expectation retail environment.
The article says the price is comparable to Apple and other download services. Two problems with that comparison. First, it's not. It's $7 for five songs, or 40 percent, or $13 for an album, or 30 percent higher. That's a significantly different price when you're dealing with price sensitivity. It's comparable to a mass-produced discounted audio CD.
Second, you're receiving an audio CD, not digital music per se, which could be a turnoff for the audience that might be interested in a fast, in-store music service. (However, since HP is the partner, and is reselling their own version of the iPod, it's possible that the ultimate digital delivery system will be a version of the iTunes Music Store.)
This is the latest incarnation of Compaq-cum-Hewlett Packard's attempts to capitalize on their relationship as a supplier to Starbucks. In January 2001, when the MobileStar deal was announced for installing hotspots, Starbucks made a big deal about Microsoft and Compaq's participation. Compaq wasn't a partner, though; Starbucks had signed a $100 million, five-year deal to buy equipment and services. Microsoft was a partner, and it never seemed to amount to anything that saw the light of day.
In the years since this deal, Compaq and then HP have reaped advertising benefits, appearing in full-page newspaper advertisements as part of the Starbucks hotspot system, even though they had nothing to do with MobileStar and T-Mobile's deployment. At one point, Starbucks had Compaq iPaq's available for customers to play with, and those disappeared, too.
It's this fumbling
Read the rest of this comment...
Why can't I get this to run on my WXP machine? I have XP Pro installed....
You linux geeks get all the good toyz!!
Darn you, Darn you to Redmond!
What do I get?
Well.. I guess I do get all the neat patches.
take that FCC!
You goddamn heartless bastard.....Mad doesn't even describe my feelings right now
So Shadowbearer, how do you really feel about Sean O'Keefe and the job he is doing at Nasa???
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"