I've got perfectly legit CDs that I've had to re-rip recently because the DRM on them - I forgot to uncheck the box in media player:( - don't know why that happened but the wma's (I know, I know, I just assumed it would do them in mp3) simply won't play any more.
...infallible techno-gods come to save us from ourselves. They most likely have similar flaws to our own, and have simply made it a few centuries further along than we have.
Ah yes but that means they probably averted crushing thermal runaway on their home planet, caused by pollution resulting from energy-generation. Maybe they came to help us over that, too.
Just something that entertains me - what is a straight line? People at some point in the past, I guess, used to think a straight line was just walking in a straight line. Because you would think like that. Now we know that isn't really straight at all because if you keep going, you come back to where we started. The plane we live on is actually a very large curve and if you really want to go in a straight line, you'd have to go away from the world entirely. We all know that now so it doesn't seem very interesting, but it must have been a giant shift for us. We may have similar revelations yet to come! Look up the definition of "time" in any dictionary or encyclopaedia. Maybe one day we'll understand that.
If we ever have a case like in the US where that woman got fined $25k for downloading when she earns minimum wage, I will personally organise a national strike and boycott of the entire music industry.
This isn't America - you can't squash the little guy just because you've got lots of money.
It also gets me how almost every single record I might ever want to buy is ruined by massive overexposure on radio.
Screw torrents and Gnutellas, I got a better idea: buy a few cds a year, why not. Then rip them all and put them on a portable hdd. Bring to work. Swap and share with colleagues!
Yes but Wikipedia puts the onus on the reader to check references. No open encyclopaedia can stop people from making malicious edits. Having a name next to a fact would perhaps make it slightly easier to catch wrongness, but it doesn't guarantee anything.
For example, there was the moderately well known case of Ronnie Hazelhurst, who was a theme-music composer for British comedy shows and, because the shows were famous and the tunes extremely memorable (for the most part), quite famous at the time of his passing (last year IIRC). Much was made of how the dick-pop anthem "Reach" by S-Club 7 was attributed to him in several newspaper obituaries. In fact, he had absolutely nothing to do with it and had simply been a victim of a journalistic prank, where someone had cleverly inserted that "fact" into his wiki page, fully intending that exact outcome! This demonstrated that many very well paid journalists just crib everything they write from wikipedia. Clearly, if they had checked the citations on the wiki article for that claim, the rick wouldn't have happened. If there are no citations, don't trust it.
I disagree. The synthesis should accommodate both views, if and only if both are supportable by references. There are many areas of academia where different experts have different views on a subject. This is played out through the publishing of peer-reviewed research papers and eventually one is shown to be correct. In the meantime, encyclopaedias can only report the facts of the disagreement. You are correct that Wikipedia shouldn't take sides, but that doesn't prevent synthesis and should never require two articles.
a) Bigger? Are you sure? How big could a moonbase be?
b) Robots.
c) We are not sending people to Mars. We cannot get enough fuel across to escape Martian gravity, so it would eb a one way trip. Please stop this.
d) It's a dry, dusty rock. It may be useful, but it ain't very interesting. Also, robots.
e) Oh come on.
I do agree with you about bailing out ridiculously risky mortgages though.
I apologise profusely for being politically incorrect. And I already acknowledged I was ranting. But tell me - what is the objective of human space exploration?
Providing star-trek based w*nk fantasies for Slashdotters? Or is it something useful? If the latter, please do fill me in.
This is not deliberate flamebaiting, but can somebody tell me why it is exactly that we're spending so much money on this stuff?
Come on, people have been to the moon. There ain't much going on there. People can't go to Mars, because it would be a one-way trip.
It's just too expensive and there's nothing to do up there that we couldn't do with robots. I blame science fiction shows. I think everyone has it lodged in their heads that we will all be flying around in spaceships within a few hundred years. Trust me, we will not. Much better to spend the billions and billions of dollars on lots of probes, better very-long-range telescopes and hell, poverty relief for those left on Earth?/rant
>> IMHO the permanant base idea was the only one that really had any sanity attached to it
Sanity like building a Death Star! Just because it ain't completely stupid, don't mean it ain't evil. Besides I don;t think it's as sane as you think. The longer Americans are there, the greater the chance of more resistance and eventually terrorist attacks on US soil.
Look, Jessica, I know you're hot but p[lease stop peddling EU pseudo science on here. It's quackery and is not accepted by any academics I've ever heard of.
Quite true. Our server at work is a best of machine, (well, a dual Xeon with a bunch of RAM) so any code doing stuff in-memory flies along, even with 200+ users logged on. But as soon as you start looping databases, you have to worry about how long it'll take to run at peak times.
Point 2 is the killer here. A friend of mine works for a firm that got blacklisted in error once. The security company that maintained the blacklist (forget which one) tried to charge them thousands of dollars to be removed!
Good point well made. There is no shortage as such, which was what King Fahd was moaning about. He doesn't want to devalue his own product by overproducing it.
Yeah but you're not factoring the extraction cost. Some oil is easy to get out, some is expensive. As I said, it's not the physical reserves but thge cost of extracting it.
Slashdot Mirror
I've got perfectly legit CDs that I've had to re-rip recently because the DRM on them - I forgot to uncheck the box in media player :( - don't know why that happened but the wma's (I know, I know, I just assumed it would do them in mp3) simply won't play any more.
Not yet but maybe quite soon!
...infallible techno-gods come to save us from ourselves. They most likely have similar flaws to our own, and have simply made it a few centuries further along than we have.
Ah yes but that means they probably averted crushing thermal runaway on their home planet, caused by pollution resulting from energy-generation. Maybe they came to help us over that, too.
GAAAAAHH! Al Gore!
Just something that entertains me - what is a straight line? People at some point in the past, I guess, used to think a straight line was just walking in a straight line. Because you would think like that. Now we know that isn't really straight at all because if you keep going, you come back to where we started. The plane we live on is actually a very large curve and if you really want to go in a straight line, you'd have to go away from the world entirely. We all know that now so it doesn't seem very interesting, but it must have been a giant shift for us. We may have similar revelations yet to come! Look up the definition of "time" in any dictionary or encyclopaedia. Maybe one day we'll understand that.
If we ever have a case like in the US where that woman got fined $25k for downloading when she earns minimum wage, I will personally organise a national strike and boycott of the entire music industry.
This isn't America - you can't squash the little guy just because you've got lots of money.
It also gets me how almost every single record I might ever want to buy is ruined by massive overexposure on radio.
Screw torrents and Gnutellas, I got a better idea: buy a few cds a year, why not. Then rip them all and put them on a portable hdd. Bring to work. Swap and share with colleagues!
I can't see the BPI stopping that.
Yes but Wikipedia puts the onus on the reader to check references. No open encyclopaedia can stop people from making malicious edits. Having a name next to a fact would perhaps make it slightly easier to catch wrongness, but it doesn't guarantee anything.
For example, there was the moderately well known case of Ronnie Hazelhurst, who was a theme-music composer for British comedy shows and, because the shows were famous and the tunes extremely memorable (for the most part), quite famous at the time of his passing (last year IIRC). Much was made of how the dick-pop anthem "Reach" by S-Club 7 was attributed to him in several newspaper obituaries. In fact, he had absolutely nothing to do with it and had simply been a victim of a journalistic prank, where someone had cleverly inserted that "fact" into his wiki page, fully intending that exact outcome! This demonstrated that many very well paid journalists just crib everything they write from wikipedia. Clearly, if they had checked the citations on the wiki article for that claim, the rick wouldn't have happened. If there are no citations, don't trust it.
I disagree. The synthesis should accommodate both views, if and only if both are supportable by references. There are many areas of academia where different experts have different views on a subject. This is played out through the publishing of peer-reviewed research papers and eventually one is shown to be correct. In the meantime, encyclopaedias can only report the facts of the disagreement. You are correct that Wikipedia shouldn't take sides, but that doesn't prevent synthesis and should never require two articles.
Author Y gets into a massive edit war, is banned, and runs off to spin some yarn to The Register about how he's persecuted by The Cabal.
I heard the Register is run by an even more sinister cabal of knowledge hoarders.
Seriously though, there have been a number of... how to put it... "veracity scares" associated with wiki over the years. Let's try different systems.
There ain't much going on there.
Apologies, the Apollo mission did do some great stuff for science but most of it could be done by robot these days. That is progress.
People can't go to Mars, because it would be a one-way trip.
Read this in the NY Times.
It's just too expensive
With $55 billion you could feed, clothe an educate every man women and child in Rwanda for a decade, assuming their GDP is about $3bn.
and there's nothing to do up there that we couldn't do with robots.
Sample return would be much easier and cheaper without bulky, fragile humans.
Much better to spend the billions and billions of dollars on lots of probes, better very-long-range telescopes
Are we alone in the universe? Manned missions won't tell us, bigger telescopes might.
Well done for assuming everyone is an American like you. Speaking of the US; your annual foreign aid budget is a disgrace, minuscule.
So yes, I think you should feed the poor a bit more and try to look big a bit less.
Bullshit. Another moonshot would be a flag mission and nothing else. They are not spending money like this for science.
to get to escape velocity you'd need a big rocket. Think maybe half the size of the Saturn V. Getting off the moon is comparatively easy.
a) Bigger? Are you sure? How big could a moonbase be?
b) Robots.
c) We are not sending people to Mars. We cannot get enough fuel across to escape Martian gravity, so it would eb a one way trip. Please stop this.
d) It's a dry, dusty rock. It may be useful, but it ain't very interesting. Also, robots. e) Oh come on.
I do agree with you about bailing out ridiculously risky mortgages though.
I apologise profusely for being politically incorrect. And I already acknowledged I was ranting. But tell me - what is the objective of human space exploration?
Providing star-trek based w*nk fantasies for Slashdotters? Or is it something useful? If the latter, please do fill me in.
All your metaphors are stupid! Music is art and costs nothing. Mountainering is a sport and costs nothing. Well, not much.
I take your point about human exploration but there should be some hope of discovering something useful, or at least interesting.
There is not a chance of humans finding anything like that in our solar system. Robots might, therefore lets send more robots.
This is not deliberate flamebaiting, but can somebody tell me why it is exactly that we're spending so much money on this stuff?
/rant
Come on, people have been to the moon. There ain't much going on there. People can't go to Mars, because it would be a one-way trip.
It's just too expensive and there's nothing to do up there that we couldn't do with robots. I blame science fiction shows. I think everyone has it lodged in their heads that we will all be flying around in spaceships within a few hundred years. Trust me, we will not. Much better to spend the billions and billions of dollars on lots of probes, better very-long-range telescopes and hell, poverty relief for those left on Earth?
How do you know? Might be really dull out there.
>> IMHO the permanant base idea was the only one that really had any sanity attached to it
Sanity like building a Death Star! Just because it ain't completely stupid, don't mean it ain't evil.
Besides I don;t think it's as sane as you think. The longer Americans are there, the greater the chance of more resistance and eventually terrorist attacks on US soil.
Dude! That was uncalled for.
Look, Jessica, I know you're hot but p[lease stop peddling EU pseudo science on here. It's quackery and is not accepted by any academics I've ever heard of.
Quite true. Our server at work is a best of machine, (well, a dual Xeon with a bunch of RAM) so any code doing stuff in-memory flies along, even with 200+ users logged on. But as soon as you start looping databases, you have to worry about how long it'll take to run at peak times.
Point 2 is the killer here. A friend of mine works for a firm that got blacklisted in error once. The security company that maintained the blacklist (forget which one) tried to charge them thousands of dollars to be removed!
Good point well made. There is no shortage as such, which was what King Fahd was moaning about. He doesn't want to devalue his own product by overproducing it.
Yeah but you're not factoring the extraction cost. Some oil is easy to get out, some is expensive. As I said, it's not the physical reserves but thge cost of extracting it.