Although it's an opinion you don't hear often, AC's voice is that of many Australians. It's not hard to scare people by saying that the Indonesian military is actually larger than the Australian population (a common belief).
The main justification given by the Aus government for sucking US cock is military support.
I recall a quote from Johnny Mnemonic (the book, it may not have been in the film).
Old guy: "I don't watch TV any more, I can't tell the difference between the shows and the commercials" Younger man: "I don't know what you mean."
Obviously the more finely the commercials are integrated with the show the harder it will be to skip them. Think product placement. Think product placement done at broadcast time and customized to the local market, and television has a new, better, revenue stream.
It's not that hard to write javascript that converts times into the user's local time. I'm in CET, but I also find the presentation of times like this pretty silly.
Does this mean there is a chance of recovering Huygens data in case of a (very unlikely) Cassini relay problem? Or will the signal be too weak to actually extract data from it?
I saw also that mutch of the DSN will be watching Cassini later for the transmission to Earth even though it's not needed. Clearly the Huygens team want to be 100% sure that if Huygens works, the data will be received.
Fortunately the landing isn't the only science the probe is designed for. Unlike Beagle, the probe will be transmitting measurements throughout its descent. So even if it smacks down like NASAs Genesis most of the mission goals will have been achieved.
Often the threat is enough to make an attacker give up.
Which would seem to indicate that a 10% failure rate would be acceptable. If I see you've got a gun, I'm not going to think "there's a one in ten chance his batteries are flat. I'm gonna go for it!" I doubt that many people would.
I remember hearing a story about guns with biometrics being introduced in South Africa about five years ago. I really hope the idea catches on. I also hope the failure rate drops, but this sort of thing can only be good.
It logged into Yahoo chat as two or three different people and proceeded to have a conversation with itself:
John_21309: Hi Bill, guess what, I just bought that new Fony TV I told you about!
Bill_39804: Hi John, gosh, is it good?
John_21309: Good? It's great! And now they're on sale!
Jill_23489: I've heard Fony TVs are the best, I'm gonna buy one right now!
and so on. The fun part was testing it by putting chunks of shakespear in and letting it loose in a quiet room.
People don't have much trouble identifying chat bots because they can't have a proper conversation with anyone. If they fake that, others can truly believe they are real people.
The good news is that the company I wrote it for went belly-up before they had a chance to use it (and after they paid for it!)
What a shame my moderation points expired while I was reading this article (really - when I loaded the parent I had points, now I don't). The Halloween images are from 2004. The first three at least. The fourth result seems be older.
I think it's pretty clear that if the technology existed in 1998, and they've already had over $7 million in funding, there's been a clever case of fraud. What I'd like to know is how this guy tricked so many people! He must've had some tech nouse to get away with it for six years!
I'm perfectly happy to accept sound in movie space battles because it seems a logical part of a the spacecraft's UI.
Humans can roughly identify locations of objects by sound without looking at them. Any good UI will make use of sound to supplement visual information. Therefore it seems logical that the highly advanced computers on board a spaceship would be capable of simulating sound from other sensor data, in exactly same way that many astronomy photos have invisible spectra shifted into visible.
It just seems obvious that a pilot who could tell the difference from a particle weapon and a rocket without looking would have a combat advantage. The same would go for telling the difference between a Romulan and a Klingon spaceship. Why waste a very advanced part of our brains by sitting in a completely silent cockpit?
Furthermore, I expect the cockpits of the future to provide an environment very similar to what we see in movies or computer games, because that's what we expect! The cockpits will probably even be quite similar and standard in design, unless some marketing arsehole screws around with them.
It most likely could be something like a quote, or a saying or something like that -- a lot of weird inscriptions at various sites across the world have been found to be such statements.
Of course! It's a quote! Now we just need to find a common phrase that includes three words beginning with V and one beginning with U!
I have two sony picturebooks, and you're right it's not great to pull out even a sub-laptop to take pictures. However, they're both great video.
I have 20G and 40G drives in mine, and for both machines the battery usually runs out before the drive fills up (ie at least 90 minutes of recording). This machine has 30G, again enough.
As for other uses of sub-laptops, mine is my main mp3 player, a handy place to backup my digital pics while travelling, and also a work machine (although I usually take along a USB keyboard 3x the size of the machine and use an on-site monitor). I also have astronomy software in case I get curious about what star I'm looking at, backups of many personal docs and videos to watch whilst on the train, as well as a few (slightly dated) games.
I agree with an earlier poster that this sounds like a good replacement, except that it's not available now. By the end of the year I doubt I'll be interested in buying a 1Ghz machine with only 256M RAM.
Going by what Paul Graham says, association your political opponents with a criticism that does mean "wrong" is an indicator there's a contraversial taboo being used!
I'm not sure that protocols really enter into it, since the initial contact was supposed to be a five-note tone (composed by Blur) at an agreed frequency (401Mhz). Maybe by protocol you mean "medium wave"?
My real point was that despite taking an above-average interest in the mission, I saw no downplaying of the contact chances for the 25th until the 25th. This looks to me like a big PR mistake. Or if I was just reading the wrong sites (beagle2.com & www.esa.int/marsexpress), what were the right ones? Where did mission control state the risks of the various mission stages?
Anyway, now that Jodrell has also failed to pick up a signal from Beagle, it looks much more likely that Beagle's simply not working. Questions of accurately estimating the difficulty of communicating with Odyssey/before/ the event are now purely academic.
first contact through Odyssey was considered a bit of a long shot
I was following the development of this mission fairly closely, but this is the first time I've seen anyone say this so clearly. Who estimated the odds on this? Who said it before the failure occurred? Is this just a question of hindsight?
From what I heard, a failure of communication with Odyssey was #3 or so on the list of likely causes. The Open Uni boys admitted that they had never tested the two systems together, but were the chances really considered so low? If so, why wasn't it mentioned earlier!
John Howard chose to keep "Kiribilli House" on Sydney's north shore as his primary residence. He was the first Prime Minister for about 30 years to reject the official residence "the lodge" in Canberra.
The risk of enormous destruction, I think, is a pretty good reason why sabotage is less likely to happen.
Sure, I was surprised that the September terrorists were obsessed enough to kill thousands of people, some of who were their countrymen. But I think that the chances of any individual being prepared to do such a tremendous amount of damage to so many countries (Africa would be the worst hit) is slim.
Maybe I'm optomistic. I know there are evil people around, but I can't imagine anyone wanting that much indiscriminate death.
Anyway, I don't believe the risk is a show-stopper. Various possibilities, such as a self-disintegrating cable, quadrouple thickness, extraordinary security etc mean that this will one day be reality.
Why is targetted advertising still non-existant? I was reading my "my yahoo" homepage earlier today, and it was full of advertising for shopping coupons and holidays that are available only to people in the US. I live in Switzerland! Yahoo knows this!
If yahoo can't even target advertising when I say they want ads for a specific region, what's the chance of Microsoft being able to succesfully guess what I'm interested in? Zero.
Actually, I blame the advertisers. Afterall, they're the ones that are wasting money trying to sell me products and then telling me they can't. Advertisers still haven't caught on the advantages of the internet, so new technology isn't going to make anything better.
Don't forget Io - there's plenty of internal heat there!
Io's surface is molten rock with continuous active volcanos. There is so much geological activity on Io, it's almost impossible to spot craters from foreign bodies. Io's too small to have stored the heat itself, it gets it from the tidal pull of Jupiter's gravity continuously deforming its shape.
Europa is the next closest moon after Io (about 150% the distance from Jupiter), and has liess mass (roughly 50%) - so it should have less tidal disruption. However, observations from Gallileo have shown that the surface of Europa is changing quite rapidly (APOD pic of Europa changing), so there is almost certainly some internal heat there. Europa is almost certainly the best candidate for life in our solar system.
We have only discovered 80 stars that have planets orbiting them, Alpha Centauri is not one of those 80.
Furthermore, of the 80 discovered, only this one happens to have the planet in such an orbit that it passes directly between the star and Earth. There's nowhere else to look, yet.
Slashdot Mirror
Although it's an opinion you don't hear often, AC's voice is that of many Australians. It's not hard to scare people by saying that the Indonesian military is actually larger than the Australian population (a common belief).
The main justification given by the Aus government for sucking US cock is military support.
I recall a quote from Johnny Mnemonic (the book, it may not have been in the film).
Old guy: "I don't watch TV any more, I can't tell the difference between the shows and the commercials"
Younger man: "I don't know what you mean."
Obviously the more finely the commercials are integrated with the show the harder it will be to skip them. Think product placement. Think product placement done at broadcast time and customized to the local market, and television has a new, better, revenue stream.
It's not that hard to write javascript that converts times into the user's local time. I'm in CET, but I also find the presentation of times like this pretty silly.
Does this mean there is a chance of recovering Huygens data in case of a (very unlikely) Cassini relay problem? Or will the signal be too weak to actually extract data from it?
I saw also that mutch of the DSN will be watching Cassini later for the transmission to Earth even though it's not needed. Clearly the Huygens team want to be 100% sure that if Huygens works, the data will be received.
Very very cool.
Fortunately the landing isn't the only science the probe is designed for. Unlike Beagle, the probe will be transmitting measurements throughout its descent. So even if it smacks down like NASAs Genesis most of the mission goals will have been achieved.
Which would seem to indicate that a 10% failure rate would be acceptable. If I see you've got a gun, I'm not going to think "there's a one in ten chance his batteries are flat. I'm gonna go for it!" I doubt that many people would.
I remember hearing a story about guns with biometrics being introduced in South Africa about five years ago. I really hope the idea catches on. I also hope the failure rate drops, but this sort of thing can only be good.
I wrote a bot that did this.
It logged into Yahoo chat as two or three different people and proceeded to have a conversation with itself:
John_21309: Hi Bill, guess what, I just bought that new Fony TV I told you about!
Bill_39804: Hi John, gosh, is it good?
John_21309: Good? It's great! And now they're on sale!
Jill_23489: I've heard Fony TVs are the best, I'm gonna buy one right now!
and so on. The fun part was testing it by putting chunks of shakespear in and letting it loose in a quiet room.
People don't have much trouble identifying chat bots because they can't have a proper conversation with anyone. If they fake that, others can truly believe they are real people.
The good news is that the company I wrote it for went belly-up before they had a chance to use it (and after they paid for it!)
What a shame my moderation points expired while I was reading this article (really - when I loaded the parent I had points, now I don't). The Halloween images are from 2004. The first three at least. The fourth result seems be older.
Slashdot covered the original claims in 1998.
I think it's pretty clear that if the technology existed in 1998, and they've already had over $7 million in funding, there's been a clever case of fraud. What I'd like to know is how this guy tricked so many people! He must've had some tech nouse to get away with it for six years!
I'm perfectly happy to accept sound in movie space battles because it seems a logical part of a the spacecraft's UI.
Humans can roughly identify locations of objects by sound without looking at them. Any good UI will make use of sound to supplement visual information. Therefore it seems logical that the highly advanced computers on board a spaceship would be capable of simulating sound from other sensor data, in exactly same way that many astronomy photos have invisible spectra shifted into visible.
It just seems obvious that a pilot who could tell the difference from a particle weapon and a rocket without looking would have a combat advantage. The same would go for telling the difference between a Romulan and a Klingon spaceship. Why waste a very advanced part of our brains by sitting in a completely silent cockpit?
Furthermore, I expect the cockpits of the future to provide an environment very similar to what we see in movies or computer games, because that's what we expect! The cockpits will probably even be quite similar and standard in design, unless some marketing arsehole screws around with them.
Or call Deutschland "Germany" or something equally strange.
Well if it's an S55 it has bluetooth. Was bluetooth switched on? Can we have the bluetooth address and device ID too?
I have a sim-lock on my S55, and a bios lock on my laptop, so if anyone stole either I wouldn't expect any identifiers to be much use.
I have two sony picturebooks, and you're right it's not great to pull out even a sub-laptop to take pictures. However, they're both great video.
I have 20G and 40G drives in mine, and for both machines the battery usually runs out before the drive fills up (ie at least 90 minutes of recording). This machine has 30G, again enough.
As for other uses of sub-laptops, mine is my main mp3 player, a handy place to backup my digital pics while travelling, and also a work machine (although I usually take along a USB keyboard 3x the size of the machine and use an on-site monitor). I also have astronomy software in case I get curious about what star I'm looking at, backups of many personal docs and videos to watch whilst on the train, as well as a few (slightly dated) games.
I agree with an earlier poster that this sounds like a good replacement, except that it's not available now. By the end of the year I doubt I'll be interested in buying a 1Ghz machine with only 256M RAM.
Going by what Paul Graham says, association your political opponents with a criticism that does mean "wrong" is an indicator there's a contraversial taboo being used!
Snotty Boldra
I'm not sure that protocols really enter into it, since the initial contact was supposed to be a five-note tone (composed by Blur) at an agreed frequency (401Mhz). Maybe by protocol you mean "medium wave"?
/before/ the event are now purely academic.
My real point was that despite taking an above-average interest in the mission, I saw no downplaying of the contact chances for the 25th until the 25th. This looks to me like a big PR mistake. Or if I was just reading the wrong sites (beagle2.com & www.esa.int/marsexpress), what were the right ones? Where did mission control state the risks of the various mission stages?
Anyway, now that Jodrell has also failed to pick up a signal from Beagle, it looks much more likely that Beagle's simply not working. Questions of accurately estimating the difficulty of communicating with Odyssey
From what I heard, a failure of communication with Odyssey was #3 or so on the list of likely causes. The Open Uni boys admitted that they had never tested the two systems together, but were the chances really considered so low? If so, why wasn't it mentioned earlier!
John Howard chose to keep "Kiribilli House" on Sydney's north shore as his primary residence. He was the first Prime Minister for about 30 years to reject the official residence "the lodge" in Canberra.
I see you support the US government's position on the Kyoto Protocol and carbon emissions.
Yes, I'm trolling
This is correct. The popular explanation is that there isn't a lot of blue food in nature, compared with red yellow or green food.
The risk of enormous destruction, I think, is a pretty good reason why sabotage is less likely to happen.
Sure, I was surprised that the September terrorists were obsessed enough to kill thousands of people, some of who were their countrymen. But I think that the chances of any individual being prepared to do such a tremendous amount of damage to so many countries (Africa would be the worst hit) is slim.
Maybe I'm optomistic. I know there are evil people around, but I can't imagine anyone wanting that much indiscriminate death.
Anyway, I don't believe the risk is a show-stopper. Various possibilities, such as a self-disintegrating cable, quadrouple thickness, extraordinary security etc mean that this will one day be reality.
Why is targetted advertising still non-existant? I was reading my "my yahoo" homepage earlier today, and it was full of advertising for shopping coupons and holidays that are available only to people in the US. I live in Switzerland! Yahoo knows this!
If yahoo can't even target advertising when I say they want ads for a specific region, what's the chance of Microsoft being able to succesfully guess what I'm interested in? Zero.
Actually, I blame the advertisers. Afterall, they're the ones that are wasting money trying to sell me products and then telling me they can't. Advertisers still haven't caught on the advantages of the internet, so new technology isn't going to make anything better.
Don't forget Io - there's plenty of internal heat there!
Io's surface is molten rock with continuous active volcanos. There is so much geological activity on Io, it's almost impossible to spot craters from foreign bodies. Io's too small to have stored the heat itself, it gets it from the tidal pull of Jupiter's gravity continuously deforming its shape.
Europa is the next closest moon after Io (about 150% the distance from Jupiter), and has liess mass (roughly 50%) - so it should have less tidal disruption. However, observations from Gallileo have shown that the surface of Europa is changing quite rapidly (APOD pic of Europa changing), so there is almost certainly some internal heat there. Europa is almost certainly the best candidate for life in our solar system.
I say go for it - let's get those genetically engineered mutants up there with the cyborgs and the drug users, then we'll see who really wins gold!
We have only discovered 80 stars that have planets orbiting them, Alpha Centauri is not one of those 80.
Furthermore, of the 80 discovered, only this one happens to have the planet in such an orbit that it passes directly between the star and Earth. There's nowhere else to look, yet.
(see the NASA article for more info)