Actually, you are right. I worked for a company that designed/built/managed shipboard casinos for a bit. The payouts for electronic games are on average about 85%, not that that makes a dif in the end when they got your money.
Sadly, that very myth is perpetuated by some of the tour guides at KSC, as I had heard that one recently on a visit there.
I am pretty sure that there are a few minds over there that are at least as capable as VonBraun but nobody has the kind of experience that those guys did considering we haven't designed a new heavy lift system in some 30 years. That kind of experience being lost imho is a shame.
It would be nice to see whats on the drawing boards for a successor to the SaturnV lifters. I agree with you on the hacks at the shuttle; the whole sts program has been a flop if you look at the original design specs. It has some great capabilities that made it state of the art for the time of its design yet by the time it flew most of the tech had been largely surpassed. Only in the last few years via the refits and upgrades have they even gotten close to todays computing capabilities. I think it still has uses but they are certainly limited and frighteningly expensive.
I have spent a lot of time thinking about what would be a better restart for the program over the years(not that my opinion has any bearing on the space program as I am but a lowly martial arts instructor and certainly not a rocket scientist). I think for the time being we should pass on the the shuttles unless they are absolutely necessary for a given mission and return to expendable technologies. Heck, the soyuz program is a cheap brute force approach to getting people up there at $15 million a pop(almost 34 launches of three people per for the price of one shuttle launch at $500 million). Ok, so one time use isn't as sexy as a reusable space plance but certainly keeps in line with Keep It Simple and leaves a lot of funds available to develop a better space plane platform on a longer engineering schedule.
Personally, I think the estimated 15 billion to build a star ladder/bean stalk would be a better investment. I think we are almost ready to make that happen and once in place it certainly would be a cheaper to loft everything up there. Sadly, I don't see anything anywhere on NASA's site with regard to it as an idea. Perhaps it is still fantasy on the verge of reality. We won't know until we try.
It seems you and I are both 'children' of the space age. The irony is frustrating for me too as we have now gone more than 30 years since we landed on the moon and are atleast 30 years behind on building a base there. It would make for a great place to use nuclear rocket engines like Prometheus and other lifters that could take advantage of the lower gravity to launch other exploration missions from.
I'd love to continue this discussion but I have to go and teach class. I added you to my friends list as this has been a good think through for me and I hope to read more of your posts. Peace, Sandor.
We can't. At least not without reengineering them from scratch. The plans were destroyed in a fire and most of the brilliant minds involved in the design are either retired or dead by now.
If we go by the examples of multiple offspring provided within the animal kingdom I would say that multiple uteri are indeed beneficial mutation. The doctor said it was an uncommon or little known variation until about 15 years ago when better scanning technologies came around. Many women have doubles and don't even know becuase theirs may not be complete, very small, or just a non functioning 'spare'.
In my wifes case they are both active uteri. The only problem she has run into was them getting out of sink after she had a miscarriage(induced by trauma from an auto accident). The solution was pretty simple; they put her on the pill for a few months and all was back in sync.
The artists will never see even the tiniest bit of the money. Check out this link and tell me how much of that money you think the actual artists are going to get: the problem with music by steve albini
Pardon the ignorance here but can any explain why these devices aren't being used as consumer video edit decks? With all the digital camcorders and the like out there seems like an obvious feature for such a device. Perhaps its in there. I don't see any info on it:(
I'm not buying one of these (or any pda for that matter) until it is smart enough to tell me that the stylus is more than three feet from it and is danger of being lost.
Re:Slashdot effect on a global scale?
on
4l-j4z333ra 0wn3d
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whelp. If it wasn't/.'ed before it certainly is now. Congrats!
There was similar work done with Tobasco sauce as a way to kill off bacterium in raw oysters a few years back. Anyone have a recollection on how that came out?
Their lives, their country, their independence. Strange as it may sound, they believe in their freedom from the USA. Shedding tears for Saddam may be too much to ask, but they believe another dictator (Bush) will simply replace him. Better the one you know...
They are not "unliberated americans". They have their own ideas and their own culture.
I certainly didn't mean to imply that in that context. I meant that dealing with a dictator like Huseein who says fight or I'll kill your family is not exactly a moral booster for a fighting force(though it does provide a high level of motivation if you love your family). One thing I certainly hope is part of the outcome of all of this is the Iraqi peoples cultural identity is restored. Something that they will have the capacity to do once Sadam is gone. The reasonable fears of the next Dicktator are not unwaranted and you do make an excellent point there.
I have a friend who works putting out these types of fires (and did so at the end of Desert Storm). The fires cannot be put out until after the hostilities are over. Our boys and girls in the armed forces don't have the training/equipment to do the task and none of the copanies that put these fires out would consider doing it until they are sure that they won't be fired on.
The smoke messes with the optics on laser guided systems and makes it difficult to use NBC suits(clogs the breathers faster from what I was told). Perhaps Sadam is trying to make it so we run out of breathers before he uses C weapons.
I too hope for minimum casualties. I have family, friends and students fighting over there. I think this will be over very soon though. The Iraqi's don't have much to fight for and are probably looking towards Sadam's departure.
... I found a mailbox I hadn't used in years, full of 1700 pieces of email. 2 were meaningful...
Hah! I got ya beat! I just got email from an account that I couldn't access for almost eight months and there were 7,018 messages in it! Of which 4 were keepers and the rest pure crap. What boggled me was that the account supposedly had a 2 meg limit that the admins never imposed and just let it grow and grow.
Anyone remember the IBM wearable/hud/cell they advertised (the one where the guy is feeding the pigeons in the park and buying/selling shit) as coming soon on the last episode of ds9?
I bought an Inspiron 7500 when the PIII 500 chips were first made available in laptops. It has been a few years now and this machine has been all over the US, banged up, dropped, kicked, etc. at jobsites, conventions & seminars. The only thing that has gone wrong with it have been the CD burning out playing CTP and the 'm' key jumping off. I hope the new line can stand up to the kind of abuse this one has because this machine is still kickin and I would certainly consider buying another one in the future.
It only makes sense to do so (ie permits for hazmat rated chems). I just hope they don't take it to a really ridiculous level like needing permits for hobby class rockets.
I know quite a few martial artists that would disagree with you. The discipline involved in the study and use of edged weapons can be a lot of fun. There are even a variety of weighted safety weapons available today that have the correct feel and balance of Katana. Not to say that there isn't any risk in training, just keep in mind you can learn anything you want if you have the spirit to do so.
That is a damn clever app. Really glad you pointed out the link. Thanks.
Now, a little OT; I really liked that book a lot and thought about the cleverness of some of the things Stephenson thought out. Those little bits really conrtibuted to the story in a lot of ways. Shaftoe was a great character too, the sections where the timeline was set back in WWII ended up turning me onto historical fictions for the first time as well.
Interesting. I think this may make for a comparison in application.
The government is currently trying to get a grip on corporate America because of the corprate accounting scandal and the many laws that these corporations skirted around, treating the FTC and related accounting laws as objects to avoid on their journey to fleece investors and subvert thier competitors in the stock game.
Many in the media have taken to the 'speed limit' analogy where the actual comparison is very accurate in reality. Many people look at the speed limit as a taxation threshold that only applies if they are caught and could care less about the lives of the other people that they endanger by breaking those laws by 15-30mph over the established limits.
Yet here we go with a method where the gov can skirt around all of our civil liberties by doing exactly what you surmised. Creating a dummy corporation and just purchasing the information. Information that they would have had to obtain via the writs required. I wonder if data collected in this method would be applicable in a court room. IANAL but my guess would be that this info would be legit to admit in a court case.
Good or bad there are some interesting implications/complications that arise. What is to prevent the news media from purchasing said telecom records and airing them in thier investigations? If I were someone like Gary Condit(just an axample) then all of those phone logs would now be available to the media. It would be plastered all over the news as to who was called, when, what kind of frequency, etc. I think this would go a long way to hampering investigations instead of helping them(from a law enforcement perspective though IANACop).
I dunno. I don't like the idea of folks getting a hold of data that I consider private and someone else turning a profit on it. I would feel better (though not much) if I at least got paid for the info as well. Afterall, its my data.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, you are right. I worked for a company that designed/built/managed shipboard casinos for a bit. The payouts for electronic games are on average about 85%, not that that makes a dif in the end when they got your money.
Sadly, that very myth is perpetuated by some of the tour guides at KSC, as I had heard that one recently on a visit there.
I am pretty sure that there are a few minds over there that are at least as capable as VonBraun but nobody has the kind of experience that those guys did considering we haven't designed a new heavy lift system in some 30 years. That kind of experience being lost imho is a shame.
It would be nice to see whats on the drawing boards for a successor to the SaturnV lifters. I agree with you on the hacks at the shuttle; the whole sts program has been a flop if you look at the original design specs. It has some great capabilities that made it state of the art for the time of its design yet by the time it flew most of the tech had been largely surpassed. Only in the last few years via the refits and upgrades have they even gotten close to todays computing capabilities. I think it still has uses but they are certainly limited and frighteningly expensive.
I have spent a lot of time thinking about what would be a better restart for the program over the years(not that my opinion has any bearing on the space program as I am but a lowly martial arts instructor and certainly not a rocket scientist). I think for the time being we should pass on the the shuttles unless they are absolutely necessary for a given mission and return to expendable technologies. Heck, the soyuz program is a cheap brute force approach to getting people up there at $15 million a pop(almost 34 launches of three people per for the price of one shuttle launch at $500 million). Ok, so one time use isn't as sexy as a reusable space plance but certainly keeps in line with Keep It Simple and leaves a lot of funds available to develop a better space plane platform on a longer engineering schedule.
Personally, I think the estimated 15 billion to build a star ladder/bean stalk would be a better investment. I think we are almost ready to make that happen and once in place it certainly would be a cheaper to loft everything up there. Sadly, I don't see anything anywhere on NASA's site with regard to it as an idea. Perhaps it is still fantasy on the verge of reality. We won't know until we try.
It seems you and I are both 'children' of the space age. The irony is frustrating for me too as we have now gone more than 30 years since we landed on the moon and are atleast 30 years behind on building a base there. It would make for a great place to use nuclear rocket engines like Prometheus and other lifters that could take advantage of the lower gravity to launch other exploration missions from.
I'd love to continue this discussion but I have to go and teach class. I added you to my friends list as this has been a good think through for me and I hope to read more of your posts. Peace, Sandor.
We can't. At least not without reengineering them from scratch. The plans were destroyed in a fire and most of the brilliant minds involved in the design are either retired or dead by now.
If we go by the examples of multiple offspring provided within the animal kingdom I would say that multiple uteri are indeed beneficial mutation. The doctor said it was an uncommon or little known variation until about 15 years ago when better scanning technologies came around. Many women have doubles and don't even know becuase theirs may not be complete, very small, or just a non functioning 'spare'.
In my wifes case they are both active uteri. The only problem she has run into was them getting out of sink after she had a miscarriage(induced by trauma from an auto accident). The solution was pretty simple; they put her on the pill for a few months and all was back in sync.
My wife has a double womb... its not that uncommon.
..that and he spells it nukular
If they ever find the missing 90%... I want back all my missing socks, several sets of keys, two wallets and my mind...
It is word for word from what I remember. It was great book but I loaned it out and never saw it again :(
The artists will never see even the tiniest bit of the money. Check out this link and tell me how much of that money you think the actual artists are going to get: the problem with music by steve albini
Pardon the ignorance here but can any explain why these devices aren't being used as consumer video edit decks? With all the digital camcorders and the like out there seems like an obvious feature for such a device. Perhaps its in there. I don't see any info on it :(
I'm not buying one of these (or any pda for that matter) until it is smart enough to tell me that the stylus is more than three feet from it and is danger of being lost.
whelp. If it wasn't /.'ed before it certainly is now. Congrats!
heh... Originally that is exactly what I thought. Then some friends dragged me to the theater and we saw it. I really liked it.
There was similar work done with Tobasco sauce as a way to kill off bacterium in raw oysters a few years back. Anyone have a recollection on how that came out?
Been done for years this way really... How many rest stops and public bathrooms are covered with the numbers of people who are being harrassed?
Their lives, their country, their independence. Strange as it may sound, they believe in their freedom from the USA. Shedding tears for Saddam may be too much to ask, but they believe another dictator (Bush) will simply replace him. Better the one you know...
They are not "unliberated americans". They have their own ideas and their own culture.
I certainly didn't mean to imply that in that context. I meant that dealing with a dictator like Huseein who says fight or I'll kill your family is not exactly a moral booster for a fighting force(though it does provide a high level of motivation if you love your family). One thing I certainly hope is part of the outcome of all of this is the Iraqi peoples cultural identity is restored. Something that they will have the capacity to do once Sadam is gone. The reasonable fears of the next Dicktator are not unwaranted and you do make an excellent point there.
I have a friend who works putting out these types of fires (and did so at the end of Desert Storm). The fires cannot be put out until after the hostilities are over. Our boys and girls in the armed forces don't have the training/equipment to do the task and none of the copanies that put these fires out would consider doing it until they are sure that they won't be fired on.
The smoke messes with the optics on laser guided systems and makes it difficult to use NBC suits(clogs the breathers faster from what I was told). Perhaps Sadam is trying to make it so we run out of breathers before he uses C weapons.
I too hope for minimum casualties. I have family, friends and students fighting over there. I think this will be over very soon though. The Iraqi's don't have much to fight for and are probably looking towards Sadam's departure.
... I found a mailbox I hadn't used in years, full of 1700 pieces of email. 2 were meaningful...
Hah! I got ya beat! I just got email from an account that I couldn't access for almost eight months and there were 7,018 messages in it! Of which 4 were keepers and the rest pure crap. What boggled me was that the account supposedly had a 2 meg limit that the admins never imposed and just let it grow and grow.
Anyone remember the IBM wearable/hud/cell they advertised (the one where the guy is feeding the pigeons in the park and buying/selling shit) as coming soon on the last episode of ds9?
Didn't rocker Ted Nugent try to buy Muzak once for $6 million just to close them down?
I bought an Inspiron 7500 when the PIII 500 chips were first made available in laptops. It has been a few years now and this machine has been all over the US, banged up, dropped, kicked, etc. at jobsites, conventions & seminars. The only thing that has gone wrong with it have been the CD burning out playing CTP and the 'm' key jumping off. I hope the new line can stand up to the kind of abuse this one has because this machine is still kickin and I would certainly consider buying another one in the future.
It only makes sense to do so (ie permits for hazmat rated chems). I just hope they don't take it to a really ridiculous level like needing permits for hobby class rockets.
I know quite a few martial artists that would disagree with you. The discipline involved in the study and use of edged weapons can be a lot of fun. There are even a variety of weighted safety weapons available today that have the correct feel and balance of Katana. Not to say that there isn't any risk in training, just keep in mind you can learn anything you want if you have the spirit to do so.
That is a damn clever app. Really glad you pointed out the link. Thanks.
Now, a little OT;
I really liked that book a lot and thought about the cleverness of some of the things Stephenson thought out. Those little bits really conrtibuted to the story in a lot of ways. Shaftoe was a great character too, the sections where the timeline was set back in WWII ended up turning me onto historical fictions for the first time as well.
Interesting. I think this may make for a comparison in application.
The government is currently trying to get a grip on corporate America because of the corprate accounting scandal and the many laws that these corporations skirted around, treating the FTC and related accounting laws as objects to avoid on their journey to fleece investors and subvert thier competitors in the stock game.
Many in the media have taken to the 'speed limit' analogy where the actual comparison is very accurate in reality. Many people look at the speed limit as a taxation threshold that only applies if they are caught and could care less about the lives of the other people that they endanger by breaking those laws by 15-30mph over the established limits.
Yet here we go with a method where the gov can skirt around all of our civil liberties by doing exactly what you surmised. Creating a dummy corporation and just purchasing the information. Information that they would have had to obtain via the writs required. I wonder if data collected in this method would be applicable in a court room. IANAL but my guess would be that this info would be legit to admit in a court case.
Good or bad there are some interesting implications/complications that arise. What is to prevent the news media from purchasing said telecom records and airing them in thier investigations? If I were someone like Gary Condit(just an axample) then all of those phone logs would now be available to the media. It would be plastered all over the news as to who was called, when, what kind of frequency, etc. I think this would go a long way to hampering investigations instead of helping them(from a law enforcement perspective though IANACop).
I dunno. I don't like the idea of folks getting a hold of data that I consider private and someone else turning a profit on it. I would feel better (though not much) if I at least got paid for the info as well. Afterall, its my data.
Just some thoughts.
Peace,
Sandor