>And for those of you who remember Tito's comments about his trip to the ISS, they sure need it. According to him (and others), the astronaughts spend a great deal of time with mundane tasks. Any slack a droid can pick up is a little more time the scientists can study science and make life more comportable for the early pioneers of living in space.
The wonderful thing about a droid living on ISS is that it can have the full intelligence of a human. Give some grunt in mission control a pair of joysticks, and a TV screen, and you've instantly got an extra crew member who is quite capable of taking inventories, inspecting hardware and even making the odd observations out a window.
When you are dealling with high-priced space missions like ISS, you don't need to program sophisticated AI. By using a real human being you get a really useful robot, not an annoying critter with the intelligence of a brain-damaged roach. --
I submitted a CNN article about these same NASA robots over a year ago, only to get it rejected. Oh well, better late than never. Strangely the CNN article has a lot more information than Nasa's own page. It even talks about how several of these bots could work together as a team. --
> Remember, Loch Ness IS connected to the ocean through canals, and various ocean creatures such as seals, porpoises, eels, etc. do get in...
I live just a few miles from Loch Ness, and I can tell you, it would be extremely improbable for seals or porpoises to get through the Caledonian canal. The canal isn't the problem, it is the ridiculously long set of locks that they'd have to navigate. They don't call it the "Highlands" of Scotland for nothing. --
So they've found a posative correlation between earthquakes and Nessie sightings. One interpretation is that the earthquakes are causing ripples in the water which look like a monster. But another interpretation is that Nessie (like most animals) doesn't like earthquakes and is forced to the surface whenever there is one.:-)
> (translated from English to Korean
> and then back to English again)
And that's the catch. Most documents are readible after they;ve been put though the blender once. But two passes through the blender results in garbage.
The Fish is quite good for the one-way trips that it was designed for. A round trip ticket through the Fish is usually deadly. --
The breakdown of talks between MS and AOL has given Mozilla a future outside of geekdom. Had the talks been successfull, the web would have been MS-only within two years.
Let's not waste this opportunity. --
Re:Curiosity killed the cat
on
Star In A Jar
·
· Score: 2
> One thing I can guarantee you is this:
> Nobody ever unravelled the basic fabric of
> spacetime by studying Scripture.
And nobody ever made Earth spontaneously explode by performing human sacrifices.
What's your point? I certainly expected to read more logical arguments on Slashdot. --
I have long wondered if a large monopolistic company could wreck some havoc by hiring a handful of independant programmers and telling them to start submitting bogus bugzilla reports, submitting patches with intentional bugs and doing other creative things to break the trees of large OSS projects. --
> Compress it. Simple ZIP compression will defeat packet-sniffers
> looking for keywords or credit card numbers.
Nice one!
Here's another option that might be even more transparent. Send a GIF or JPEG of the message. Most modern email programs will display this sort of attachment inline, meaning that really clueless receivers won't even know that you are doing something different.
I'm torn as to whether this suggestion is Funny or Insightful.;-)
--
>Just as mars asteroids have hit earth, the same
> applies for the debris from (massive) impacts
> that Earth has had in it's history.
Oh dear, I can see it now. We spend 50 billion dollars mounting a robotic sample return mission, and guess which rock out of all the ones lying on Mars do you think our robot will pick up and bring back...
(And you thought the Imperial to Metric mistake was a scandal.) --
> Untill I get my 850Mhz or better with loads of RAM > (512Mor more) I think I'll steer clear of mozilla.
Yes, this used to be the case. But their recent releases are much faster. I'm quite happy running Mozilla on my 333Mhz with 128MB. Startup time is still a bit slow, but even that is scheduled to be fixed 'real soon'. It really is stunning the progress they've made.
> WIth AOL not shipping AOL 6.0 with mozilla / netscape, > who is their target audience at this point?
Ah, now that's the problem. Once Mozilla is out, how on Earth are we going to get (normal) people to use it? This one scares me, since I don't see any realistic paths to prevent MSIE from completing its browser monopoly. --
Very nice speech (I mean it). But my answer is no.
Microsoft have virtually completed a total monopoly in the browser market. (The last hope was that AOL would switch to Mozilla, but instead they've crawled into bed with Microsoft.) Once Exporer has the monopoly, there are literally dozens of well-documented ways for MS to leverage this into a server monopoly. If you own all the clients, it isn't too hard to make sure that any hosting company that wants to be able to use the "professional new IE features" (whatever they may be) will need to dump Linux/Apache and buy Windows/IIS. Throw in a little DMCA so that Apache can't replicate the new features.
Yes, I am scared. How the heck do we combat this? I can't see how we can win this one.:-( --
> Nobody wants to admit this. It is the Internet's dirty little secret that when a company complains to an ISP about its shitty latency and packet loss rates, it is NOT because Mr. PHB can't check his stock portfolio (after all, he can do this over a modem with 20%+ packet loss and a ping of 500 ms). It is because somebody in the IT staff just got fragged by an LPB.
Not always the case. I've switched ISPs twice as a result of high latency. My beef is that using remote editors through Telnet and SSH is virtually impossible when it takes a second or more for each keystroke to show up on the screen.
Now did I type seven backspaces or eight? The cursor has stopped moving; is that all, or are there more cursor commands in the pipe? --
Some of my favourite memories of high school and university were spotting errors in exam questions. The best one was in a SmallTalk exam where they gave us half a page of code, then spent several pages asking what outputs would be generated based on various inputs. I spotted that there was a period missing (same effect as a missing semicolon in most other languages). So I simply wrote "parse error, line 18" as an answer to each question.
The problem was that we never got to examine the marked exams, so to this day I don't know if a clueless droid marked me as wrong, or had a good laugh and granted me the marks. --
Except program a decent AI. I'd give the world if they'd expose the programming interface so that 3rd party AIs could be coded. Quake did this, and the resulting robots were so good that they changed the nature of the game. Civ would be a much easier programming challenge than games like Quake since it is turn-based instead of real-time. This is the simplest way to improve the AI; let the community do all the hard work.
I think everyone would agree that the most important, yet the most difficult, improvement required in Civ III is better AI. Even if nothing else changed, most of us would purchase the upgrade if we could finally meet oponents who beat the pants off us and didn't do so by cheating left, right and center. --
>Overwhelmingly, many of the calls we handled involved items the user could have gotten step by step instructions for fixing if they had looked at our web pages.
Reminds me of when I phoned my ISP's tech support about three years ago:
Me: Hello, could you tell me the IP of your DNS servers. Tech: You can get all that information from our website, sir.
Some things just can't be answered by an online FAQ.
--
I don't like this idea. Most serious users get a lot of subliminal information from their computer just by listening to it. If my PC stops responding, and the hard drive is clicking away, I know it's just busy scratching an itch (very technical, I know).
Back in the good old days I'd attach a wire from my parallel port to an input on the back of my radio. That way I could hear crosstalk from traffic on the main bus. Although I couldn't tell exactly what the noise meant, I could tell what the computer was up to.
I dread the day when hard drives are solid state and don't make any noise. This proposal effectively does that by moving the hard drive out of ear shot. The hard drive is the last component left that gives off useful acoustic status info. --
Re:greatest feat "up to that moment"?
on
Review: The Dish
·
· Score: 1
>That and it has been done before, just not as big. Skylab, Salut, and Mir. ISS...been there done that.
With that reasoning, you could state that Apollo has been done before, just not as big. Columbus, Stevenson, Wright Brothers, Gagarin, Armstrong...been there done that.
Every "great feat" is a step beyond what came before. And ISS is the step beyond everything we've done before. --
Re:greatest feat "up to that moment"?
on
Review: The Dish
·
· Score: 2
> Good God, man, what would be a great feat since then?? It's still the greatest single engineering achievement in history,
The International Space Station.
Over a dozen years in the planning, nine years under construction in orbit, sixteen countries participating, fourty-eight rocket launches, scores of space walks, six robot arms and thousands of times more computational power than Apollo. Plus at the end of it all, you get a working space station with six laboratories that will be in use for decades.
The only problem with the space station is that it lack the theatrical "ta-da" moment that Apollo had when Neil stepped foot on the surface.
--
> > "by making their product vastly superior to the competition"
>
> Logic time: If it were vastly superior to the competition, why is there still competition?
I thought we kept whining that M$ was a monopoly? Can't have it both ways.:-)
--
> And incidentally, thanks for noting that it's the Canadarm, not the
"Big Arm" as CNN calls it.
Wow. I didn't believe it until I saw their page myself. And the quotes they managed to obtain: "This is space stuff." "It's cutting edge."
Talk about dumbing down the news.
--
Slashdot Mirror
The wonderful thing about a droid living on ISS is that it can have the full intelligence of a human. Give some grunt in mission control a pair of joysticks, and a TV screen, and you've instantly got an extra crew member who is quite capable of taking inventories, inspecting hardware and even making the odd observations out a window.
When you are dealling with high-priced space missions like ISS, you don't need to program sophisticated AI. By using a real human being you get a really useful robot, not an annoying critter with the intelligence of a brain-damaged roach.
--
I submitted a CNN article about these same NASA robots over a year ago, only to get it rejected. Oh well, better late than never. Strangely the CNN article has a lot more information than Nasa's own page. It even talks about how several of these bots could work together as a team.
--
I live just a few miles from Loch Ness, and I can tell you, it would be extremely improbable for seals or porpoises to get through the Caledonian canal. The canal isn't the problem, it is the ridiculously long set of locks that they'd have to navigate. They don't call it the "Highlands" of Scotland for nothing.
--
Disclaimer: I live five miles from Loch Ness
--
> and then back to English again)
And that's the catch. Most documents are readible after they;ve been put though the blender once. But two passes through the blender results in garbage.
The Fish is quite good for the one-way trips that it was designed for. A round trip ticket through the Fish is usually deadly.
--
Let's not waste this opportunity.
--
> Nobody ever unravelled the basic fabric of
> spacetime by studying Scripture.
And nobody ever made Earth spontaneously explode by performing human sacrifices.
What's your point? I certainly expected to read more logical arguments on Slashdot.
--
I have long wondered if a large monopolistic company could wreck some havoc by hiring a handful of independant programmers and telling them to start submitting bogus bugzilla reports, submitting patches with intentional bugs and doing other creative things to break the trees of large OSS projects.
--
> looking for keywords or credit card numbers.
Nice one!
Here's another option that might be even more transparent. Send a GIF or JPEG of the message. Most modern email programs will display this sort of attachment inline, meaning that really clueless receivers won't even know that you are doing something different.
I'm torn as to whether this suggestion is Funny or Insightful. ;-)
--
> applies for the debris from (massive) impacts
> that Earth has had in it's history.
Oh dear, I can see it now. We spend 50 billion dollars mounting a robotic sample return mission, and guess which rock out of all the ones lying on Mars do you think our robot will pick up and bring back...
(And you thought the Imperial to Metric mistake was a scandal.)
--
> (512Mor more) I think I'll steer clear of mozilla.
Yes, this used to be the case. But their recent releases are much faster. I'm quite happy running Mozilla on my 333Mhz with 128MB. Startup time is still a bit slow, but even that is scheduled to be fixed 'real soon'. It really is stunning the progress they've made.
> WIth AOL not shipping AOL 6.0 with mozilla / netscape,
> who is their target audience at this point?
Ah, now that's the problem. Once Mozilla is out, how on Earth are we going to get (normal) people to use it? This one scares me, since I don't see any realistic paths to prevent MSIE from completing its browser monopoly.
--
Very nice speech (I mean it). But my answer is no.
Microsoft have virtually completed a total monopoly in the browser market. (The last hope was that AOL would switch to Mozilla, but instead they've crawled into bed with Microsoft.) Once Exporer has the monopoly, there are literally dozens of well-documented ways for MS to leverage this into a server monopoly. If you own all the clients, it isn't too hard to make sure that any hosting company that wants to be able to use the "professional new IE features" (whatever they may be) will need to dump Linux/Apache and buy Windows/IIS. Throw in a little DMCA so that Apache can't replicate the new features.
Yes, I am scared. How the heck do we combat this? I can't see how we can win this one. :-(
--
Not always the case. I've switched ISPs twice as a result of high latency. My beef is that using remote editors through Telnet and SSH is virtually impossible when it takes a second or more for each keystroke to show up on the screen.
Now did I type seven backspaces or eight? The cursor has stopped moving; is that all, or are there more cursor commands in the pipe?
--
The problem was that we never got to examine the marked exams, so to this day I don't know if a clueless droid marked me as wrong, or had a good laugh and granted me the marks.
--
Except program a decent AI. I'd give the world if they'd expose the programming interface so that 3rd party AIs could be coded. Quake did this, and the resulting robots were so good that they changed the nature of the game. Civ would be a much easier programming challenge than games like Quake since it is turn-based instead of real-time. This is the simplest way to improve the AI; let the community do all the hard work.
I think everyone would agree that the most important, yet the most difficult, improvement required in Civ III is better AI. Even if nothing else changed, most of us would purchase the upgrade if we could finally meet oponents who beat the pants off us and didn't do so by cheating left, right and center.
--
> science fiction novel was turned into a BBC TV series.
This is from the BBC's website. How many things can you spot that are wrong with this statement? I count four. This is a record even for the BBC.
--
It is symptomatic of the deep sexual meanings that runs through this whole movie...
[eep, I was going to start comparing rockets, monoliths and spacepods to anatomy, but this is getting too gross for me]
--
Reminds me of when I phoned my ISP's tech support about three years ago:
Me: Hello, could you tell me the IP of your DNS servers.
Tech: You can get all that information from our website, sir.
Some things just can't be answered by an online FAQ.
--
They weren't "compressed files". That's the only problem. They were just literal fragments of the original file.
--
Back in the good old days I'd attach a wire from my parallel port to an input on the back of my radio. That way I could hear crosstalk from traffic on the main bus. Although I couldn't tell exactly what the noise meant, I could tell what the computer was up to.
I dread the day when hard drives are solid state and don't make any noise. This proposal effectively does that by moving the hard drive out of ear shot. The hard drive is the last component left that gives off useful acoustic status info.
--
With that reasoning, you could state that Apollo has been done before, just not as big. Columbus, Stevenson, Wright Brothers, Gagarin, Armstrong...been there done that.
Every "great feat" is a step beyond what came before. And ISS is the step beyond everything we've done before.
--
The International Space Station.
Over a dozen years in the planning, nine years under construction in orbit, sixteen countries participating, fourty-eight rocket launches, scores of space walks, six robot arms and thousands of times more computational power than Apollo. Plus at the end of it all, you get a working space station with six laboratories that will be in use for decades.
The only problem with the space station is that it lack the theatrical "ta-da" moment that Apollo had when Neil stepped foot on the surface.
--
>
> Logic time: If it were vastly superior to the competition, why is there still competition?
I thought we kept whining that M$ was a monopoly? Can't have it both ways. :-)
--
FYI: Canada was the third country (after US and USSR) to have a satellite in space. That was back in 1962. More info about Alouette.
Canada and the US have been cooperating with joint ventures ever since. Even the feet of Apollo's Lunar Modules were built in Canada.
--
Wow. I didn't believe it until I saw their page myself. And the quotes they managed to obtain:
"This is space stuff."
"It's cutting edge."
Talk about dumbing down the news.
--