For the record, Michael Foale is a Briton who was commander of the ISS on Expedition 8. He was British/American with dual nationality, so one could argue that he was a European commander of the ISS.
Hopefully the Lucas hammer of wrath won't destroy this.
Actually, Lucas has a pretty good history of letting fans make and distribute fanfilms on the net, as long as they're not for profit. More so than any other directory/owner.
Actually, it only takes 1.2 seconds (or very slightly over) to get back to Earth. The two seconds you're thinking about was the communication delay for Apollo, representing the roundtrip there and back. This is only one way.
Real media format Quicktime
For those of you who need to watch it in absolute realtime, I've found that all the yahoo feeds (windows media) whilst being the best video quality are generally about 1-2 minutes behind realtime.
Realmedia is normally about 5-10 seconds behind realtime.
...considering the bizarre questions that were being asked to "verify my identity" prior to offering me some insurance package...
This is one area which most people (including the banks) fail to see the security weakness - phonecalls from banks. I've had many calls from my bank (or phone company/ISP) which start with "This is such and such bank calling for Mr XXX. Can you just confirm your identity with the following security questions..."
I refuse to answer the questions until they have convinced me that they are the bank - afterall, I could call up a random person pretending to be the bank/insurance provider etc many times over the course of a few weeks asking different security questions until I know all their answers to all their security questions, then just phone up their bank claiming to be them and transfer all their money to me. In many cases, this results in an impasse as there is no number I can look up on the internet/yellow pages to call them back so I know that they are the bank, and they are unwilling to offer any information to me to prove who they are until I've verified who I am, which I won't do until I know who they are...
My friend has gone through a verification of their address with the bank with her saying the first line, then the bank saying the next line and alternating like this such that they both acknowledge the authenticity of the other party before proceeding. In that case it was just offering insurance so why they needed to verify her identity I have no idea. She hung up about 30 seconds after the 5 minute verification procedure when she realised they were just cold-calling her.
Yes. The BBC article states that this ring is the cause of the dark matter on Iapetus. Iapetus is tidally locked to Saturn, so will always present the same side to the direction of motion in its orbit. This side is the darker side of Iapetus and it seems to fit perfectly that this is due to collisions with the particles from this ring over the eons like bugs on a cosmic windscreen.
Just because the distance is huge doesn't mean that it's not to be considered part of the Saturnian system. The ring particles orbit Saturn and at this distance, Saturn is the major gravitational source (why the orbit Saturn and not float off into a solar orbit). Fornjot (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fornjot_(moon)) orbits much further away than this ring at 24.5 million km (15 million miles) away from Saturn and is still part of the Saturnian system.
I don't know whether this article mentions it, but the BBC article mentions that there are 10-20 particles per cubic kilometre of space. I think that's why they haven't discovered them until now
Having RTFA I am still at a loss to see how this differs from current 10Gb/s fibre optics. Is it just that they've given it a new name, as that's all that I can get out of the article.
I think the point is that you have to put it on if you "modify the appearance of a person". I would doubt that modifying the white-balance would count as this, but agree that it will be hard to choose an arbitrary point to draw the line of what does and what does not need the disclaimer.
Actually, a lot of people probably would. One of the things that really annoys me is that large companies will dispose of their old IT equipment by throwing it in a skip rather than donating it to local schools who would benefit from them. One of the major reasons that they do this (from what I have heard) is because "if we give it away to a school and someone goes wrong, we would be liable and could get sued". I still don't understand why the school can't just agree (via a disclamer or whatever) not to sue, but that's probably because I'm not a lawyer and live in my own little make-believe world where people shouldn't sue just because they can get away with it.
Because it's a one-word answer to an unasked question that parrot's the American Dream (tm): "Get rich without having to do anything".
I'd be suing if I got that kind of service from an e-mail service provider. They're selling you a service and support. If they don't provide it, you deserve compensation.
And that's why the American legal system is FUTA. In most sensible countries, you *can* sue them *if* you have experienced a major problem due to their behaviour - eg, if you can show that you have lost money/posessions/safety etc as a direct result of someone else having access to your emails. You can't just go "I feel slightly aggrieved that someone read my email - give me a bajillion dollars!!!!".
I fail to see how the Challenger disaster can be attributed to using the shuttle far beyond its intended service life when it was merely 3 years old...
As for the bolt, the shuttle in question is Atlantis. The bolt has already been removed and the window certified safe for flight. But good work with the uninformed hysteria.
Then put their ideas throgh such rigorous scrutiny that nothing new got built. Until finally rickety old space trucks (Challenger etc...) blew up and took people with them.
I am trying to fathom how you can lambaste Nasa for being too rigourous with their safety scrutiny in one sentence, then complain that they blew up (insinuating that they weren't rigourous enough) in the following one.
Shuttle missions cost an average of $450M to launch. I don't know about Soyuzes (What the hell is the plural of Soyuz? Soyez?) but I think that private individuals have purchased seats on the Soyuz ride to the ISS for about $20M.
I remember hearing something in a documentary a year or so ago (the documentary was about Helium-3, but that's not important right now) that if there were nicely stack ingots of gold bullion on the surface of the moon it would still be too expensive to send a mission up there to retrieve them. Bringing back less-valuable oil from Saturn would be ridiculously expensive.
I wouldn't leave my car outside my house with the keys in the ignition for all to steal (well, actually, my car is terrible so I have contemplated it). However, if I could 'burn' a new car from a car 'blank' for the price of a few pennies every time I left the house I would. I would also drive it over to my friends house and not worry if I found a different way back - I'd just leave my car there and create a new one.
There is no reason to treat digital media the same way as physical media unless you're trying to force people to play by your old rules when the world has moved on.
What makes me laugh is how carefully choreographed the original photo was. One black person, one asian, one white. Two men, one woman. It's amazing to see publicity photos etc and notice how many of them have the we-must-have-one-of-everything mentality in them. If everyone wasn't so paranoid about offending anyone, then the publicity shoot would have probably had a brief of "get three people in a room to look like they're having a fun meeting, then take a photo". Because everyone's afraid of being called a racist, I'm sure the brief would have included the caveat "Make sure one is black, one is Asian and at least one of them is a woman". The only thing that's missing is an "I'm gay" sign on one of them.
Slashdot Mirror
For the record, Michael Foale is a Briton who was commander of the ISS on Expedition 8. He was British/American with dual nationality, so one could argue that he was a European commander of the ISS.
There is no "on-top" in space ;-)
Hopefully the Lucas hammer of wrath won't destroy this.
Actually, Lucas has a pretty good history of letting fans make and distribute fanfilms on the net, as long as they're not for profit. More so than any other directory/owner.
Actually, it only takes 1.2 seconds (or very slightly over) to get back to Earth. The two seconds you're thinking about was the communication delay for Apollo, representing the roundtrip there and back. This is only one way.
Balls. I thought that I'd got it all correct. The 4th Yahoo feed should be 1200k/s, not 100k/s. Sorry about that.
NasaTV Feeds at different resolutions:
100k/s, 320/240
200k/s, 320/240
500k/s, 480x360 (I think)
100k/s, 640/480
All Windows Media format
Real media format
Quicktime
For those of you who need to watch it in absolute realtime, I've found that all the yahoo feeds (windows media) whilst being the best video quality are generally about 1-2 minutes behind realtime. Realmedia is normally about 5-10 seconds behind realtime.
...considering the bizarre questions that were being asked to "verify my identity" prior to offering me some insurance package...
This is one area which most people (including the banks) fail to see the security weakness - phonecalls from banks. I've had many calls from my bank (or phone company/ISP) which start with "This is such and such bank calling for Mr XXX. Can you just confirm your identity with the following security questions..."
I refuse to answer the questions until they have convinced me that they are the bank - afterall, I could call up a random person pretending to be the bank/insurance provider etc many times over the course of a few weeks asking different security questions until I know all their answers to all their security questions, then just phone up their bank claiming to be them and transfer all their money to me. In many cases, this results in an impasse as there is no number I can look up on the internet/yellow pages to call them back so I know that they are the bank, and they are unwilling to offer any information to me to prove who they are until I've verified who I am, which I won't do until I know who they are...
My friend has gone through a verification of their address with the bank with her saying the first line, then the bank saying the next line and alternating like this such that they both acknowledge the authenticity of the other party before proceeding. In that case it was just offering insurance so why they needed to verify her identity I have no idea. She hung up about 30 seconds after the 5 minute verification procedure when she realised they were just cold-calling her.
Yes. The BBC article states that this ring is the cause of the dark matter on Iapetus. Iapetus is tidally locked to Saturn, so will always present the same side to the direction of motion in its orbit. This side is the darker side of Iapetus and it seems to fit perfectly that this is due to collisions with the particles from this ring over the eons like bugs on a cosmic windscreen.
Just because the distance is huge doesn't mean that it's not to be considered part of the Saturnian system. The ring particles orbit Saturn and at this distance, Saturn is the major gravitational source (why the orbit Saturn and not float off into a solar orbit). Fornjot (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fornjot_(moon)) orbits much further away than this ring at 24.5 million km (15 million miles) away from Saturn and is still part of the Saturnian system.
I don't know whether this article mentions it, but the BBC article mentions that there are 10-20 particles per cubic kilometre of space. I think that's why they haven't discovered them until now
No, Earth doesn't. We'd have noticed it by now if it did.
Having RTFA I am still at a loss to see how this differs from current 10Gb/s fibre optics. Is it just that they've given it a new name, as that's all that I can get out of the article.
I hope we'd finally get to know the truth about McDonalds hamburgers. Or can we count them as persons?
You can barely count them as food, let alone persons/people.
I think the point is that you have to put it on if you "modify the appearance of a person". I would doubt that modifying the white-balance would count as this, but agree that it will be hard to choose an arbitrary point to draw the line of what does and what does not need the disclaimer.
Actually, a lot of people probably would. One of the things that really annoys me is that large companies will dispose of their old IT equipment by throwing it in a skip rather than donating it to local schools who would benefit from them. One of the major reasons that they do this (from what I have heard) is because "if we give it away to a school and someone goes wrong, we would be liable and could get sued". I still don't understand why the school can't just agree (via a disclamer or whatever) not to sue, but that's probably because I'm not a lawyer and live in my own little make-believe world where people shouldn't sue just because they can get away with it.
How is that a troll?
Because it's a one-word answer to an unasked question that parrot's the American Dream (tm): "Get rich without having to do anything".
I'd be suing if I got that kind of service from an e-mail service provider. They're selling you a service and support. If they don't provide it, you deserve compensation.
And that's why the American legal system is FUTA. In most sensible countries, you *can* sue them *if* you have experienced a major problem due to their behaviour - eg, if you can show that you have lost money/posessions/safety etc as a direct result of someone else having access to your emails. You can't just go "I feel slightly aggrieved that someone read my email - give me a bajillion dollars!!!!".
I fail to see how the Challenger disaster can be attributed to using the shuttle far beyond its intended service life when it was merely 3 years old... As for the bolt, the shuttle in question is Atlantis. The bolt has already been removed and the window certified safe for flight. But good work with the uninformed hysteria.
Then put their ideas throgh such rigorous scrutiny that nothing new got built. Until finally rickety old space trucks (Challenger etc...) blew up and took people with them.
I am trying to fathom how you can lambaste Nasa for being too rigourous with their safety scrutiny in one sentence, then complain that they blew up (insinuating that they weren't rigourous enough) in the following one.
Shuttle missions cost an average of $450M to launch. I don't know about Soyuzes (What the hell is the plural of Soyuz? Soyez?) but I think that private individuals have purchased seats on the Soyuz ride to the ISS for about $20M.
I remember hearing something in a documentary a year or so ago (the documentary was about Helium-3, but that's not important right now) that if there were nicely stack ingots of gold bullion on the surface of the moon it would still be too expensive to send a mission up there to retrieve them. Bringing back less-valuable oil from Saturn would be ridiculously expensive.
...now that we've discovered that the real price tag is over a billion a flight.
Actually, the price to launch a shuttle averages at $450M, so half a billion. source: http://www.nasa.gov/centers/kennedy/about/information/shuttle_faq.html#10
I wouldn't leave my car outside my house with the keys in the ignition for all to steal (well, actually, my car is terrible so I have contemplated it). However, if I could 'burn' a new car from a car 'blank' for the price of a few pennies every time I left the house I would. I would also drive it over to my friends house and not worry if I found a different way back - I'd just leave my car there and create a new one. There is no reason to treat digital media the same way as physical media unless you're trying to force people to play by your old rules when the world has moved on.
What makes me laugh is how carefully choreographed the original photo was. One black person, one asian, one white. Two men, one woman. It's amazing to see publicity photos etc and notice how many of them have the we-must-have-one-of-everything mentality in them. If everyone wasn't so paranoid about offending anyone, then the publicity shoot would have probably had a brief of "get three people in a room to look like they're having a fun meeting, then take a photo". Because everyone's afraid of being called a racist, I'm sure the brief would have included the caveat "Make sure one is black, one is Asian and at least one of them is a woman". The only thing that's missing is an "I'm gay" sign on one of them.
It could have got lost on the way to the shops to get some groceries...
Storm Trooper armor is riot gear. It's for protecting against rocks and small arms while they beat down demonstrators.
You mean like those Ewoks that they thoroughly quashed on the moon of Endor?