Note that AC specifically said, "that nothing else does quite as well," which is not quite the same as "that nothing else does." Personally I'm not aware of any bothersome differences in implementation, but I'd be interested to hear them. I want to say that one editor I've used will plop a bunch of whitespace at the end of a line if you copy and paste the uneven ends of lines, but I just tried the three at my disposal at the moment (VS, Notepad++, gVim) and none of them did that.
Here is how to do it in a bunch of different editors, by the way.
That may not be your personal point of view, but the wider "Anti-ACA" movement is not nearly as enlightened as you.
You can say that again: a Kaiser poll last year found 36 percent of people believe that death panels are part of the ACA, and 20 percent weren't sure. And people like Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity are still talking about them.
You have just confirmed everything I was saying. There was a political atmosphere against the ACA, and the Democrats pushed it anyway despite the fact that the result was completely predictable.
Hindsight is 20/20. Was it really predictable back then, when Democrats were cutting major provisions out of Obamacare like the government option and making it more and more like Romneycare, trying to appease the Republicans? Sure, it seems obvious to us now, but who could have predicted that they'd change their minds about things like the individual mandate and insurance exchanges?
At some point you really have to accept that "stable" is an estimation or else it's completely meaningless. The moon's orbit increases by 3.8 cm per year, which means it's stable to 1 part in 10^11. The Earth is moving away from the Sun 15 cm per year, so it's stable to 1 part in 10^13. Atomic clocks are stable to 1 part in 10^15.
I haven't seen the movie, but the original question was about the orbital decay time of the Enterprise, and one poster said to make the orbit higher. If it had started in a proper geostationary orbit, for example, drag, solar wind, and all the other sources of orbital decay would be small enough that it would take many, many years to bring it down, in which case the engines could be repaired well before reentry. In that case, calling it a stable orbit isn't even close to a bad approximation.
Smartass responses aside, I wonder if there are a moon-synchronous orbits that use the tidal bulge effect to counteract drag forces. I was just reading about LAGEOS satellites, which have no altitude control but are in a "highly stable" MEO that supposedly won't decay for 8.4 million years, which might as well be forever since they'll probably be destroyed by micrometeorite/debris collisions well before they have to worry about burning up on reentry. A brief look at their orbital properties makes the moon-synchronous thing unlikely, but I wonder how they calculated that orbit lifetime.
It's not 34 distinct state exchanges. It's 1 exchange for the population of 34 states.
My point is that it *should* be 34 distinct exchanges. The thing is, the system has to refer to a database of available coverage based on the user's home state. This is one of the Republican ideals that did not make it into the final bill: people in one state cannot purchase insurance offered in another state.
Well over a million users and their site couldn't handle it? Mr President, call up Yahoo or Go-daddy... they could have your site up and running in a few minutes.
Why isn't anybody talking about the actual problem? Sixteen states have their own sites, which supposedly run just fine. This was certainly true for Colorado. But the rest of the states opted to allow the federal government to run their exchanges. So what do they do? They put thirty-four state exchanges on the same site! Who the hell thought that was a good idea? Is it really not obvious that the main site should have a map with 50 clickable states, taking you to different sites, hosted on different servers?
Not existing doesn't bother me, its the dying part I'm afraid of. That said, if it were my job to identify less horrible ways to die than by nuke, I'd be employed for life.
Depends how close you are...standing right next to one as it detonates is probably the least horrible way to die, since your brain won't even have time to register any pain before it doesn't exist anymore. If you're so lucky to be standing right on top of one, some your constituent atoms get blasted out of the atmosphere and spread across the solar system for free.
What worries me is that the site has only one passing mention of radiation, for a mission to Jupiter orbit. Aren't humans in that region going to be almost literally fried?
Wikipedia says there is enough radiation on the surface of Europa to kill a human in a single day (it's tidally locked with Jupiter, but I'm not sure if that helps the far side or not). I imagine they're headed to the subsurface ocean, if it exists, so they won't have to worry about it after they melt/drill their way through as many meters of ice as it takes (the Mars One site claims that five meters of Martian soil provides the same protection as Earth's atmosphere). But yeah, they'd definitely need to do something far more drastic than Mars One to protect the astronauts as they approach Europa until they land and get to a safe depth.
This program would cover things like: eating habits, sexual behavior, phys ed, and at least a basic program on managing money.
This sounds like trying to teach the kids something that should be taught by parents.
Maybe, but the structured way a school might approach such things could be very valuable. Eating habits, for example, are very much set by parents, but nutrition is an entire field of study. Have the students record everything they eat for a week and estimate a few key nutrition measurements like Calories, cholesterol, etc. Such an activity can and should be repeated several times a year. Telling people how they should eat is probably less effective than showing them exactly how they eat, and what problems they might have if they continue eating like they do.
+1, Should have been pointed out earlier. This point is more important than the dangers of gorilla arm syndrome, or the technical feasibility of it, or the capability/likelihood of Elon Musk to follow-through with it.
Barring a radical new piece of software with crazy amounts of automation, the utility of such a thing would be limited to design reviews. Don't get me wrong, if impressing the customer with something like this helped sell products, it would totally be worth it, but call me a skeptic when it comes to performing actual work with such an interface (at least, for the foreseeable future).
While I have an android device, it hasn't got google play/appstore, login, nor data service to it... Android 4.3's restrictions, google's no-server limitations, etc are all pushing the masses towards sheepitude...
This sounds confused. Just about the only android devices that don't have data service are e-readers,
I don't think the data service bit was a particularly important point, but I wanted to point out that there are five Android devices in my household: two phones, a tablet, an e-reader, and an Ouya...and only one of those devices has data service (the older phone is not hooked up to cell service at all, but most things work perfectly fine with just wi-fi, and I save tons of battery by keeping the cell radio off).
And yet, between the ones who want to terraform Mars tomorrow (which I will note that GP is not), and the people like you who want to kick the can down the road forever, we will make progress. Just as GP said.
One important thing to note is that astronauts will need cargo for the foreseeable future. Just because it doesn't look like we'll ever be able to Sling people doesn't mean it's not useful to manned spaceflight.
Read the comment by M1rth, which I won't quote for it's length, but its +5 rating is well-earned.
Regarding your original post I have a lot of the same issues with mine, but it's a bit early to consider it a failure. I happened to receive my Ouya the very same day that my wife had a baby, so I haven't tinkered with it much, but I agree that the game selection left much to be desired. I even downloaded some racing game that I couldn't figure out how to get to an actual race. But, the PS2 was the last console I bought on launch day; I can't remember how long it was until a game came out that actually made it worth owning, but I assure you it wasn't terribly quickly.
Anyway, for my part, the fact that there aren't many games yet is largely irrelevant. It got me into programming games again in a way that Android didn't do before -- probably has something to do with controllers -- and I heartily disagree with your demos=bad sentiment. So I'm hoping to release something on a platform where I can actually make money (the PSP homebrew scene was not so good for that).
These going away is a good reason to buy one now. The simple touch is great for rooting giving you a pretty good e-ink android tablet. I've been eyeing them on eBay for a couple weeks now. Time to pull the trigger I think.
You missed out. Yesterday the Simple Touch went on clearance at Radio Shack for $20, and the one with GlowLight was $30. The scum of the Earth, I mean, eBay resellers, will have cleaned them out by now, unless you get super lucky. I snagged the last regular Simple Touch at my local one for a grand total of $20.97 and I'm going to Nooter it this weekend..
I signed up and proofread a few pages when I saw someone mention this site in the comments a few weeks ago. It's pretty interesting stuff and is mostly intuitive, but there are some tricky corner cases, e.g. hyphenated words that span two lines. Back in the day, publishers were pretty inconsistent about what words were hyphenated (e.g. to-day), and Project Gutenberg is (rightly) adamant that the text maintains the original spelling and hyphenation.
The only thing I completely missed was that I didn't put an extra newline at the top of the page when the first line was the start of a new paragraph. Those instances were found and corrected by the second-round proofreader. There is a third round of proofing, two rounds of formatting, two rounds of post processing, and then an optional "Smooth Reading" round that anyone can do. I've checked out a few of the finished products, and they are much, much better than the naked OCR'd texts of old.
In other words, for full backwards compatibility you need all three devices.
My 60 GB first generation PS3 begs to differ! Just a month ago I was looking through my games and I realized I never played Growlanser 3 (which came in the set with 2, which I played through twice), so I've been going through that one. As a bonus, it takes some of the load off my aging furnace.
Antibiotics and most medications are not controlled substances. It is not illegal to purchase or possess them. What is controlled, however, is the SALE of antibiotics for human medical use. So this means you can import them from some jurisdiction where you can purchase them (the internet, or across the Mexican border), or possibly get the same medication from a agricultural supply company intended for veterinary use.
Used to be you could get a big bottle of Amoxicillin tablets "for fish" from Amazon for about the cost of a co-pay, and they'd last a lot longer than a prescription. I just noticed today that Amazon pulled all those listings down some time last year, but you can find them elsewhere. So really, is it any wonder we have this problem in the US? Why would people bother spending the time and money to go to a doctor when you can spend a minute online and less money to have a huge bottle of antibiotics shipped to them in a couple days? I've never tried them (I try to avoid medications and other drugs like caffeine as much as possible), but speaking as a frugal person with crappy health insurance I can see the appeal.
Voyager was launched at an almost optimal time for gravitational slingshots, so that resource is already tapped out. If I recall correctly the planets won't align like that again until sometime next century and it still wouldn't go faster. In fact that was what gave it most of the speed so we need a lot better propulsion go get anywhere.
I hadn't heard of this so I looked it up. It turns out that the "Grand Tour" was for Voyager 2, which received gravity assists from Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. It's true that those four won't be in a similar alignment until the next century, but Voyager 1 only received gravity assists from Jupiter and Saturn (and Titan). I haven't done the math or anything, but those two should line up at least a couple times each century (see the Cassini trajectory).
Some dumb, back-of-the-envelope calcs with existing tech: assuming a 50 mN Xenon ion thruster that can run continuously for 3.5 years (NASA's NSTAR did this) spacecraft, right now we can add about 11 km/s to a 500 kg spacecraft per thruster. New Horizons is 478 kg, so I figure 500 kg is a decent guesstimate (it would need a much bigger RTG to run even a single ion thruster for that long, though). Also, New Horizons will be traveling 13 km/s when it reaches the same distance as Voyager 1 with only a Jupiter gravity assist, so even with a less-than-optimal gravity assist I think we can easily beat Voyager 1's speed (turning on the thrusters after the last gravity assist, of course). It would still take us decades to pass it, but we could.
Still, that wouldn't take us to the Oort cloud in any decent amount of time. If we used a different nuclear fuel with a longer half-life we could stretch our ability to power it, but probably at the cost of peak power.
Spending money to get more eyes on the design is not necessarily a bad thing. Okay, it's probably not worth wasting money to start training astronauts (which Mars One is supposedly going to do this year) since we already know how to do that. But design studies tend to build on themselves. For anybody keeping score:
Mars Direct: the original mission to Mars plan by Robert Zubrin, which included a return flight, first developed in 1990 and expanded upon in his book The Case for Mars. Elements of this plan, which Zubrin proposed to replace the full-up, half-trillion dollar, new-development-for-everything Mars mission developed back in 1989, have been incorporated in pretty much every design since then, including Mars One and NASA's Design Reference Mission.
Mars for Less: a modification of Mars Direct that used currently available launchers -- not relying on a Saturn V-class rocket like the original Mars Direct or Falcon Heavy like the others (including a modified Mars Direct). One criticism that came out of this that also applies to Mars Direct is that the estimation of aerobraking was too optimistic.
Mars to Stay: a more generalized policy that says any mission to Mars should plan for permanent settlement, with only an emergency return system. Supposedly there are more concrete designs out there, but they don't seem to be readily available. They seem to advocate going more through the official channels, with the hope that the US Government will pick up the tab. I believe/. had a few discussions about this when Buzz Aldrin spoke in favor of one-way missions. A lot of the latest designs, including Mars One, have picked up and ran with this idea.
Mars One: the project by Dutch entrepreneur Bas Lansdorp. This year they're supposedly going to select 24 astronauts and begin training, and they claim that they'll have 20 of them on Mars by 2033. Note that Zubrin has looked at this, and he is quite doubtful at their ability to raise the necessary funding (which relies heavily on merchandise, advertising, reality TV, etc.).
Those are just the proposals that are getting lots of press, or have impressive people backing them. There are tons of others that are just as far along (only paper designs), e.g. by MarsDrive, DevelopSpace, etc. And of course you also have Inspiration Mars, which is Dennis Tito's plan to send two astronauts on a flyby mission in 2018. Maybe it's hype, but Mars One does feel like it's a bit further along since they aren't waiting on government funding to move ahead with some aspects of their plan. Although, Zubrin's own Mars Society has bitten off small chunks of necessary development, such as the Mars Analogue Research Stations [1] and [2].
If a skilled hacker specifically target me I'd be pwned but why would they bother?
This is the important bit. At this point, the only people this type of thing matters to is government and corporate users that handle sensitive information. And even then, social engineering is far easier and more effective.
Almost. Of course, this bill is full of weasel words so it'll never pass, and we're still dancing around the two things we need:
1) Software patent reform.
2) Loser pays for every kind of lawsuit, not just patent troll suits. You know, like every other sane country on the planet.
It's not quite the same these days. Cost of Dartmouth:
For the 2001-2002 school year, full-time undergrad tuition was $26,400. Combined tuition, room and board charges was $34,458.
For the 2012-2013 school year, full-time undergrad tuition is $43,782. Undergraduate tuition, room, board, and fees is $57,998.
Not saying it's not worth it for some things, but it's a lot more painful now than it was back then. I went to a public university that was less than $10k/year for tuition, room & board when I started in 2001, now it's over $20k.
Slashdot Mirror
Note that AC specifically said, "that nothing else does quite as well," which is not quite the same as "that nothing else does." Personally I'm not aware of any bothersome differences in implementation, but I'd be interested to hear them. I want to say that one editor I've used will plop a bunch of whitespace at the end of a line if you copy and paste the uneven ends of lines, but I just tried the three at my disposal at the moment (VS, Notepad++, gVim) and none of them did that.
Here is how to do it in a bunch of different editors, by the way.
That may not be your personal point of view, but the wider "Anti-ACA" movement is not nearly as enlightened as you.
You can say that again: a Kaiser poll last year found 36 percent of people believe that death panels are part of the ACA, and 20 percent weren't sure. And people like Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity are still talking about them.
You have just confirmed everything I was saying. There was a political atmosphere against the ACA, and the Democrats pushed it anyway despite the fact that the result was completely predictable.
Hindsight is 20/20. Was it really predictable back then, when Democrats were cutting major provisions out of Obamacare like the government option and making it more and more like Romneycare, trying to appease the Republicans? Sure, it seems obvious to us now, but who could have predicted that they'd change their minds about things like the individual mandate and insurance exchanges?
At some point you really have to accept that "stable" is an estimation or else it's completely meaningless. The moon's orbit increases by 3.8 cm per year, which means it's stable to 1 part in 10^11. The Earth is moving away from the Sun 15 cm per year, so it's stable to 1 part in 10^13. Atomic clocks are stable to 1 part in 10^15.
I haven't seen the movie, but the original question was about the orbital decay time of the Enterprise, and one poster said to make the orbit higher. If it had started in a proper geostationary orbit, for example, drag, solar wind, and all the other sources of orbital decay would be small enough that it would take many, many years to bring it down, in which case the engines could be repaired well before reentry. In that case, calling it a stable orbit isn't even close to a bad approximation.
Guess what, no object in orbit can maintain it's orbit without propulsion.
False.
References
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_point#L4_and_L5
Smartass responses aside, I wonder if there are a moon-synchronous orbits that use the tidal bulge effect to counteract drag forces. I was just reading about LAGEOS satellites, which have no altitude control but are in a "highly stable" MEO that supposedly won't decay for 8.4 million years, which might as well be forever since they'll probably be destroyed by micrometeorite/debris collisions well before they have to worry about burning up on reentry. A brief look at their orbital properties makes the moon-synchronous thing unlikely, but I wonder how they calculated that orbit lifetime.
It's not 34 distinct state exchanges. It's 1 exchange for the population of 34 states.
My point is that it *should* be 34 distinct exchanges. The thing is, the system has to refer to a database of available coverage based on the user's home state. This is one of the Republican ideals that did not make it into the final bill: people in one state cannot purchase insurance offered in another state.
Well over a million users and their site couldn't handle it? Mr President, call up Yahoo or Go-daddy... they could have your site up and running in a few minutes.
Why isn't anybody talking about the actual problem? Sixteen states have their own sites, which supposedly run just fine. This was certainly true for Colorado. But the rest of the states opted to allow the federal government to run their exchanges. So what do they do? They put thirty-four state exchanges on the same site! Who the hell thought that was a good idea? Is it really not obvious that the main site should have a map with 50 clickable states, taking you to different sites, hosted on different servers?
Not existing doesn't bother me, its the dying part I'm afraid of. That said, if it were my job to identify less horrible ways to die than by nuke, I'd be employed for life.
Depends how close you are...standing right next to one as it detonates is probably the least horrible way to die, since your brain won't even have time to register any pain before it doesn't exist anymore. If you're so lucky to be standing right on top of one, some your constituent atoms get blasted out of the atmosphere and spread across the solar system for free.
What worries me is that the site has only one passing mention of radiation, for a mission to Jupiter orbit. Aren't humans in that region going to be almost literally fried?
Wikipedia says there is enough radiation on the surface of Europa to kill a human in a single day (it's tidally locked with Jupiter, but I'm not sure if that helps the far side or not). I imagine they're headed to the subsurface ocean, if it exists, so they won't have to worry about it after they melt/drill their way through as many meters of ice as it takes (the Mars One site claims that five meters of Martian soil provides the same protection as Earth's atmosphere). But yeah, they'd definitely need to do something far more drastic than Mars One to protect the astronauts as they approach Europa until they land and get to a safe depth.
This program would cover things like: eating habits, sexual behavior, phys ed, and at least a basic program on managing money.
This sounds like trying to teach the kids something that should be taught by parents.
Maybe, but the structured way a school might approach such things could be very valuable. Eating habits, for example, are very much set by parents, but nutrition is an entire field of study. Have the students record everything they eat for a week and estimate a few key nutrition measurements like Calories, cholesterol, etc. Such an activity can and should be repeated several times a year. Telling people how they should eat is probably less effective than showing them exactly how they eat, and what problems they might have if they continue eating like they do.
+1, Should have been pointed out earlier. This point is more important than the dangers of gorilla arm syndrome, or the technical feasibility of it, or the capability/likelihood of Elon Musk to follow-through with it.
Barring a radical new piece of software with crazy amounts of automation, the utility of such a thing would be limited to design reviews. Don't get me wrong, if impressing the customer with something like this helped sell products, it would totally be worth it, but call me a skeptic when it comes to performing actual work with such an interface (at least, for the foreseeable future).
While I have an android device, it hasn't got google play/appstore, login, nor data service to it... Android 4.3's restrictions, google's no-server limitations, etc are all pushing the masses towards sheepitude...
This sounds confused. Just about the only android devices that don't have data service are e-readers,
I don't think the data service bit was a particularly important point, but I wanted to point out that there are five Android devices in my household: two phones, a tablet, an e-reader, and an Ouya...and only one of those devices has data service (the older phone is not hooked up to cell service at all, but most things work perfectly fine with just wi-fi, and I save tons of battery by keeping the cell radio off).
Space nutters... Man they are nuts.
And yet, between the ones who want to terraform Mars tomorrow (which I will note that GP is not), and the people like you who want to kick the can down the road forever, we will make progress. Just as GP said.
One important thing to note is that astronauts will need cargo for the foreseeable future. Just because it doesn't look like we'll ever be able to Sling people doesn't mean it's not useful to manned spaceflight.
See this slashdot article on how demos lower sales http://games.slashdot.org/story/09/01/17/0339230/do-game-demos-have-an-adverse-effect-on-sales
Read the comment by M1rth, which I won't quote for it's length, but its +5 rating is well-earned.
Regarding your original post I have a lot of the same issues with mine, but it's a bit early to consider it a failure. I happened to receive my Ouya the very same day that my wife had a baby, so I haven't tinkered with it much, but I agree that the game selection left much to be desired. I even downloaded some racing game that I couldn't figure out how to get to an actual race. But, the PS2 was the last console I bought on launch day; I can't remember how long it was until a game came out that actually made it worth owning, but I assure you it wasn't terribly quickly.
Anyway, for my part, the fact that there aren't many games yet is largely irrelevant. It got me into programming games again in a way that Android didn't do before -- probably has something to do with controllers -- and I heartily disagree with your demos=bad sentiment. So I'm hoping to release something on a platform where I can actually make money (the PSP homebrew scene was not so good for that).
These going away is a good reason to buy one now. The simple touch is great for rooting giving you a pretty good e-ink android tablet. I've been eyeing them on eBay for a couple weeks now. Time to pull the trigger I think.
You missed out. Yesterday the Simple Touch went on clearance at Radio Shack for $20, and the one with GlowLight was $30. The scum of the Earth, I mean, eBay resellers, will have cleaned them out by now, unless you get super lucky. I snagged the last regular Simple Touch at my local one for a grand total of $20.97 and I'm going to Nooter it this weekend..
I'm not sure that's entirely german to this discussion.
I signed up and proofread a few pages when I saw someone mention this site in the comments a few weeks ago. It's pretty interesting stuff and is mostly intuitive, but there are some tricky corner cases, e.g. hyphenated words that span two lines. Back in the day, publishers were pretty inconsistent about what words were hyphenated (e.g. to-day), and Project Gutenberg is (rightly) adamant that the text maintains the original spelling and hyphenation.
The only thing I completely missed was that I didn't put an extra newline at the top of the page when the first line was the start of a new paragraph. Those instances were found and corrected by the second-round proofreader. There is a third round of proofing, two rounds of formatting, two rounds of post processing, and then an optional "Smooth Reading" round that anyone can do. I've checked out a few of the finished products, and they are much, much better than the naked OCR'd texts of old.
In other words, for full backwards compatibility you need all three devices.
My 60 GB first generation PS3 begs to differ! Just a month ago I was looking through my games and I realized I never played Growlanser 3 (which came in the set with 2, which I played through twice), so I've been going through that one. As a bonus, it takes some of the load off my aging furnace.
Antibiotics and most medications are not controlled substances. It is not illegal to purchase or possess them. What is controlled, however, is the SALE of antibiotics for human medical use. So this means you can import them from some jurisdiction where you can purchase them (the internet, or across the Mexican border), or possibly get the same medication from a agricultural supply company intended for veterinary use.
Used to be you could get a big bottle of Amoxicillin tablets "for fish" from Amazon for about the cost of a co-pay, and they'd last a lot longer than a prescription. I just noticed today that Amazon pulled all those listings down some time last year, but you can find them elsewhere. So really, is it any wonder we have this problem in the US? Why would people bother spending the time and money to go to a doctor when you can spend a minute online and less money to have a huge bottle of antibiotics shipped to them in a couple days? I've never tried them (I try to avoid medications and other drugs like caffeine as much as possible), but speaking as a frugal person with crappy health insurance I can see the appeal.
Voyager was launched at an almost optimal time for gravitational slingshots, so that resource is already tapped out. If I recall correctly the planets won't align like that again until sometime next century and it still wouldn't go faster. In fact that was what gave it most of the speed so we need a lot better propulsion go get anywhere.
I hadn't heard of this so I looked it up. It turns out that the "Grand Tour" was for Voyager 2, which received gravity assists from Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. It's true that those four won't be in a similar alignment until the next century, but Voyager 1 only received gravity assists from Jupiter and Saturn (and Titan). I haven't done the math or anything, but those two should line up at least a couple times each century (see the Cassini trajectory).
Some dumb, back-of-the-envelope calcs with existing tech: assuming a 50 mN Xenon ion thruster that can run continuously for 3.5 years (NASA's NSTAR did this) spacecraft, right now we can add about 11 km/s to a 500 kg spacecraft per thruster. New Horizons is 478 kg, so I figure 500 kg is a decent guesstimate (it would need a much bigger RTG to run even a single ion thruster for that long, though). Also, New Horizons will be traveling 13 km/s when it reaches the same distance as Voyager 1 with only a Jupiter gravity assist, so even with a less-than-optimal gravity assist I think we can easily beat Voyager 1's speed (turning on the thrusters after the last gravity assist, of course). It would still take us decades to pass it, but we could.
Still, that wouldn't take us to the Oort cloud in any decent amount of time. If we used a different nuclear fuel with a longer half-life we could stretch our ability to power it, but probably at the cost of peak power.
Why no fail2ban or DenyHosts? I suppose my sshd doesn't allow root login so stuff like that showing up on my logs is not a big concern anyway.
Spending money to get more eyes on the design is not necessarily a bad thing. Okay, it's probably not worth wasting money to start training astronauts (which Mars One is supposedly going to do this year) since we already know how to do that. But design studies tend to build on themselves. For anybody keeping score:
Mars Direct: the original mission to Mars plan by Robert Zubrin, which included a return flight, first developed in 1990 and expanded upon in his book The Case for Mars. Elements of this plan, which Zubrin proposed to replace the full-up, half-trillion dollar, new-development-for-everything Mars mission developed back in 1989, have been incorporated in pretty much every design since then, including Mars One and NASA's Design Reference Mission.
Mars for Less: a modification of Mars Direct that used currently available launchers -- not relying on a Saturn V-class rocket like the original Mars Direct or Falcon Heavy like the others (including a modified Mars Direct). One criticism that came out of this that also applies to Mars Direct is that the estimation of aerobraking was too optimistic.
Mars to Stay: a more generalized policy that says any mission to Mars should plan for permanent settlement, with only an emergency return system. Supposedly there are more concrete designs out there, but they don't seem to be readily available. They seem to advocate going more through the official channels, with the hope that the US Government will pick up the tab. I believe /. had a few discussions about this when Buzz Aldrin spoke in favor of one-way missions. A lot of the latest designs, including Mars One, have picked up and ran with this idea.
Mars One: the project by Dutch entrepreneur Bas Lansdorp. This year they're supposedly going to select 24 astronauts and begin training, and they claim that they'll have 20 of them on Mars by 2033. Note that Zubrin has looked at this, and he is quite doubtful at their ability to raise the necessary funding (which relies heavily on merchandise, advertising, reality TV, etc.).
Those are just the proposals that are getting lots of press, or have impressive people backing them. There are tons of others that are just as far along (only paper designs), e.g. by MarsDrive, DevelopSpace, etc. And of course you also have Inspiration Mars, which is Dennis Tito's plan to send two astronauts on a flyby mission in 2018. Maybe it's hype, but Mars One does feel like it's a bit further along since they aren't waiting on government funding to move ahead with some aspects of their plan. Although, Zubrin's own Mars Society has bitten off small chunks of necessary development, such as the Mars Analogue Research Stations [1] and [2].
If a skilled hacker specifically target me I'd be pwned but why would they bother?
This is the important bit. At this point, the only people this type of thing matters to is government and corporate users that handle sensitive information. And even then, social engineering is far easier and more effective.
Yes, but loser pays isn't a panacea for our problems.
If it was perfect, then it'd already be law. But it's almost certainly better than what we've got if the point is to stop frivolous lawsuits.
loser pays represents a very real deterrent to taking advantage of the legal system where one can't afford the possibility of losing.
I assume you don't mean "exploiting" because that's exactly the point. I couldn't have said it better myself.
Almost. Of course, this bill is full of weasel words so it'll never pass, and we're still dancing around the two things we need:
1) Software patent reform.
2) Loser pays for every kind of lawsuit, not just patent troll suits. You know, like every other sane country on the planet.
It's not quite the same these days. Cost of Dartmouth:
For the 2001-2002 school year, full-time undergrad tuition was $26,400. Combined tuition, room and board charges was $34,458.
For the 2012-2013 school year, full-time undergrad tuition is $43,782. Undergraduate tuition, room, board, and fees is $57,998.
Not saying it's not worth it for some things, but it's a lot more painful now than it was back then. I went to a public university that was less than $10k/year for tuition, room & board when I started in 2001, now it's over $20k.