The first experiments into this area created a gateway into another dimension. The horrors which came through the gateway before it could be closed are indescribable. Ever since, these scientists have worked under the constant, unblinking eye of these... things, knowing that if they ever waver or stray, they and their families will be fed to that which is only known in nightmares. Their task: to reopen the gateway to bring through others of their kind.
These scientists' lives are tinged with more fear that you will ever know. At least, more than you will know until they get that gateway open again.
There is nothing shocking in the grandparent post. Let's see:
- Stupid joke on slashdot, no shock. - Stupid moderators mod up a stupid joke as "Insightful", no surprise. - Somebody misunderstands stupid joke, makes shocked post saying "no, no, no!", no surprise.
If he was quoting exactly what the guy said, it would have been written from right to left in Hebrew.
You're concentrating totally on the "journalist" layer and completely ignoring the "translator" layer. As someone who has to deal with translation and different languages every day, I find it completely plausible that the translator flubbed.
Don't forget that you're getting these quotes through at least two layers of indirection, namely the translator and the journalist. Despite the inverted commas, this is not necessarily anything resembling a direct quote.
Yeah, I know all of my cheap electronics comes with a giant "Made in Cambodia" stamped on it.
Come on, cheap electronics is made in a place where you have a highly-educated (compared to a place like extremely-rural Cambodia) technically-minded but still rather cheap populace. This is a place like China, not Bumfuck, Cambodia.
Another reason is that people see Burma (justified or not, I have no idea) as a hopeless shithole, whereas people actually see great potential for China. It's exactly the same reason why people get so upset when the US executes a 17-year-old whereas mass killings in Wherever, Africa don't even make the evening news. People get upset about things like that in the US because the US is, in general, a shining beacon of reasonableness, and we're also really big and powerful, so people are tremendously annoyed when we do something stupid. (Yeah, I'm sure people will laugh at that statement, bring it on!) It's not a double standard, more like an expression of disappointment.
What are you doing with a five-digit ID and still thinking that slashdot needs to do less editorializing?
Despite the motto, slashdot is not a news site. It's a commentary site. If you're coming here looking for straight news with no opinion, you are coming to the wrong place. It is, to put it in programming terms, a feature, not a bug.
He's not talking about people opposed to Orion. He's talking about the people who protested Cassini, both the launch and the Earth flyby gravity-assist maneuver. It had a little radioisotope generator onboard which is what got everybody so up in arms. But nobody pays attention to it on a Mars probe. Is it suddenly not evil if it's not generating electricity?
Quite a few Big Ideas writers badly overestimated the time needed to land on the Moon, and were rather surprised by the 1969 date. Of course, in everything afterwards they were terribly optimistic.
Fusion reactors and lasers are just slower than originally thought. Fusion is very close, and basically reduced to an engineering problem at this point. Giant laser weapons are at hand, and are the subject of at least a couple of military projects slated to go into service Real Soon Now. (And I mean they're already built and working, just not in production.)
The main problem with widespread personal air transport is that it's harder to fly a plane than it is to drive a car, and managing traffic and congestion are much harder. Both problems should gradually go away as computers get more advanced. Have patience.
Making tiny things can also be a way to a Big Idea; have a look at carbon nanotubes and the space elevator concept for example. Quite a few Big Ideas have been held up because of the lack of good materials, and the making-tiny-things field (I won't call it nanotech because that carries a truckload of undeserved connotations) can help out a lot in the materials science area.
Your sentence needs one small but extremely important addition, IMO. "It's interesting how all the big ideas of the 1940s and 1950s have come to nothing as of January 2004."
A new car built by my company leave somewhere traveling at 60 miles per hour. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field (A) multiply it by the probable rate of failure (B) then multiply the result by the average out of court settlement (C). A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of the recall, we don't do one.
Challenger was basically NASA deciding that the risk of an accident was less than the cost of delaying the launch.
Columbia is more complex. The problem was less obvious and harder to see before the shit hit the fan. On the other hand, there were simple and obvious things to do, like taking pictures of the thing with spy satellites, which the Air Force was ready and willing to do, that NASA management vetoed for no apparent reason. In retrospect it sounds like deliberate ignorance.
I haven't seen anybody suggest something like this, so here I go. I've never had to try it, because I always have a reasonable connection when I want to ssh, but it seems to me that it could work pretty well.
Get a MUD client. Connect to localhost, telnet port, and log in. From there, ssh out. You still have a big delay between when you hit return and when you see the result, but you don't have a delay for the rest of your typing, which is the big deal. Interactive editors would be a bit hard to use, but you can always run those locally. The point is to buffer your command line instead of sending it character-by-character, so your latency shows up only when you actually expect a real response from the other end.
I haven't found any references to what you say, can you back it up? (If an AC will read this reply and respond to it....)
The failure was actually not what I quoted, but it was rather a mix-up between pounds of force and newtons. This resulted in mid-flight course corrections not being correct.
Can you tell me what a part supplier was doing calculating mid-course correction data?
Maybe you forgot about that one probe where the people at JPL were slapping their foreheads and saying, "Meters?! That number was in meters?! We thought it was feet!"
And then there was the one where they slapped their foreheads, saying, "What, you wanted average velocity on that line? We thought that was instantaneous velocity!" after the probe in question got dumped into the Atlantic.
Then there was, "What do you mean, 'too cold to launch'? It's a frigging rocket! We have a schedule to keep!"
I could go on. I think you get the point. They are only human, and they make stupid mistakes just like everybody else.
They will make the same mistake again, because they must. The problem with any DRM scheme is that the DRM'd product must contain the decryption keys in it somewhere. If the product can get to them, hackers can get to them too.
CSS was much weaker than that, of course, but I'm confident that even if CSS hadn't had stupid built-in vulnerabilities that it still would have been cracked, at the very least by grabbing decryption keys out of official hardware or software.
I'm sure this was meant in jest, but a very real incident like this destroyed a very expensive mission once. The first launch of the Ariane 5 blew up about a minute into the launch. The reason was later determined to be because of an uncaught exception which shut down both flight control computers, leading to a big boom. (I think it was the flight control computers; at least I know it was an uncaught exception that shut down an entire doubly-redundant computer system.)
If you tune out the modern politicians and have a look at the constitution, it's pretty clear that you're not supposed to trust the government. This is just further proof that the guys who set everything up were frickin' geniuses.
I've always believed that the primary purpose of the American system of government is to keep politicians so busy undermining each other and trying to get people to vote for them that they can't do any real damage with their power. Anytime I hear about gridlock, I smile inside. American society is something which ain't broke, and politicians are always trying to fix it.
You're right that diesel doesn't explode, and tanks have a lot of other explosive junk onboard, but I can't decide why you posted it. Hydrogen is not particularly dangerous either. Hindenburg went up in flames because it was painted with thermite.
Slashdot Mirror
The first experiments into this area created a gateway into another dimension. The horrors which came through the gateway before it could be closed are indescribable. Ever since, these scientists have worked under the constant, unblinking eye of these... things, knowing that if they ever waver or stray, they and their families will be fed to that which is only known in nightmares. Their task: to reopen the gateway to bring through others of their kind.
These scientists' lives are tinged with more fear that you will ever know. At least, more than you will know until they get that gateway open again.
There is nothing shocking in the grandparent post. Let's see:
- Stupid joke on slashdot, no shock.
- Stupid moderators mod up a stupid joke as "Insightful", no surprise.
- Somebody misunderstands stupid joke, makes shocked post saying "no, no, no!", no surprise.
Move along, nothing to see here.
He does have a point.
If every mail server on the internet ran Windows, e-mail would never work well enough to function as the vector for a worm.
If he was quoting exactly what the guy said, it would have been written from right to left in Hebrew.
You're concentrating totally on the "journalist" layer and completely ignoring the "translator" layer. As someone who has to deal with translation and different languages every day, I find it completely plausible that the translator flubbed.
Don't forget that you're getting these quotes through at least two layers of indirection, namely the translator and the journalist. Despite the inverted commas, this is not necessarily anything resembling a direct quote.
Yeah, I know all of my cheap electronics comes with a giant "Made in Cambodia" stamped on it.
Come on, cheap electronics is made in a place where you have a highly-educated (compared to a place like extremely-rural Cambodia) technically-minded but still rather cheap populace. This is a place like China, not Bumfuck, Cambodia.
Another reason is that people see Burma (justified or not, I have no idea) as a hopeless shithole, whereas people actually see great potential for China. It's exactly the same reason why people get so upset when the US executes a 17-year-old whereas mass killings in Wherever, Africa don't even make the evening news. People get upset about things like that in the US because the US is, in general, a shining beacon of reasonableness, and we're also really big and powerful, so people are tremendously annoyed when we do something stupid. (Yeah, I'm sure people will laugh at that statement, bring it on!) It's not a double standard, more like an expression of disappointment.
If everything were identical, it wouldn't be cross-platform development at all.
Cross-platform development means you need to discover and work around all of the little quirks and differences of each system.
So OS X calls 'ldd' 'otool -L', big fucking deal. That's not even interesting enough to register on the list of cross-platform differences.
It's so common that the guy who wrote the thing used it for a certain related web site.
What are you doing with a five-digit ID and still thinking that slashdot needs to do less editorializing?
Despite the motto, slashdot is not a news site. It's a commentary site. If you're coming here looking for straight news with no opinion, you are coming to the wrong place. It is, to put it in programming terms, a feature, not a bug.
He's not talking about people opposed to Orion. He's talking about the people who protested Cassini, both the launch and the Earth flyby gravity-assist maneuver. It had a little radioisotope generator onboard which is what got everybody so up in arms. But nobody pays attention to it on a Mars probe. Is it suddenly not evil if it's not generating electricity?
Quite a few Big Ideas writers badly overestimated the time needed to land on the Moon, and were rather surprised by the 1969 date. Of course, in everything afterwards they were terribly optimistic.
Fusion reactors and lasers are just slower than originally thought. Fusion is very close, and basically reduced to an engineering problem at this point. Giant laser weapons are at hand, and are the subject of at least a couple of military projects slated to go into service Real Soon Now. (And I mean they're already built and working, just not in production.)
The main problem with widespread personal air transport is that it's harder to fly a plane than it is to drive a car, and managing traffic and congestion are much harder. Both problems should gradually go away as computers get more advanced. Have patience.
Making tiny things can also be a way to a Big Idea; have a look at carbon nanotubes and the space elevator concept for example. Quite a few Big Ideas have been held up because of the lack of good materials, and the making-tiny-things field (I won't call it nanotech because that carries a truckload of undeserved connotations) can help out a lot in the materials science area.
Your sentence needs one small but extremely important addition, IMO. "It's interesting how all the big ideas of the 1940s and 1950s have come to nothing as of January 2004."
Unless I'm grossly mistaken, this is exactly how it has always worked on eBay.
A new car built by my company leave somewhere traveling at 60 miles per hour. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field (A) multiply it by the probable rate of failure (B) then multiply the result by the average out of court settlement (C). A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of the recall, we don't do one.
Challenger was basically NASA deciding that the risk of an accident was less than the cost of delaying the launch.
Columbia is more complex. The problem was less obvious and harder to see before the shit hit the fan. On the other hand, there were simple and obvious things to do, like taking pictures of the thing with spy satellites, which the Air Force was ready and willing to do, that NASA management vetoed for no apparent reason. In retrospect it sounds like deliberate ignorance.
I haven't seen anybody suggest something like this, so here I go. I've never had to try it, because I always have a reasonable connection when I want to ssh, but it seems to me that it could work pretty well.
Get a MUD client. Connect to localhost, telnet port, and log in. From there, ssh out. You still have a big delay between when you hit return and when you see the result, but you don't have a delay for the rest of your typing, which is the big deal. Interactive editors would be a bit hard to use, but you can always run those locally. The point is to buffer your command line instead of sending it character-by-character, so your latency shows up only when you actually expect a real response from the other end.
I haven't found any references to what you say, can you back it up? (If an AC will read this reply and respond to it....)
The failure was actually not what I quoted, but it was rather a mix-up between pounds of force and newtons. This resulted in mid-flight course corrections not being correct.
Can you tell me what a part supplier was doing calculating mid-course correction data?
Maybe you forgot about that one probe where the people at JPL were slapping their foreheads and saying, "Meters?! That number was in meters?! We thought it was feet!"
And then there was the one where they slapped their foreheads, saying, "What, you wanted average velocity on that line? We thought that was instantaneous velocity!" after the probe in question got dumped into the Atlantic.
Then there was, "What do you mean, 'too cold to launch'? It's a frigging rocket! We have a schedule to keep!"
I could go on. I think you get the point. They are only human, and they make stupid mistakes just like everybody else.
They will make the same mistake again, because they must. The problem with any DRM scheme is that the DRM'd product must contain the decryption keys in it somewhere. If the product can get to them, hackers can get to them too.
CSS was much weaker than that, of course, but I'm confident that even if CSS hadn't had stupid built-in vulnerabilities that it still would have been cracked, at the very least by grabbing decryption keys out of official hardware or software.
I'm sure this was meant in jest, but a very real incident like this destroyed a very expensive mission once. The first launch of the Ariane 5 blew up about a minute into the launch. The reason was later determined to be because of an uncaught exception which shut down both flight control computers, leading to a big boom. (I think it was the flight control computers; at least I know it was an uncaught exception that shut down an entire doubly-redundant computer system.)
People who make the laws are not greatly affected by them. It's sad but not particularly surprising.
If you tune out the modern politicians and have a look at the constitution, it's pretty clear that you're not supposed to trust the government. This is just further proof that the guys who set everything up were frickin' geniuses.
I've always believed that the primary purpose of the American system of government is to keep politicians so busy undermining each other and trying to get people to vote for them that they can't do any real damage with their power. Anytime I hear about gridlock, I smile inside. American society is something which ain't broke, and politicians are always trying to fix it.
So you need a five ms electronic delay. Do you:
1) Write a short program using a microcontroller you already have.
2) Go out and buy some electronics and build a little delay circuit.
Would you really forego the simpler solution just because it's 'overkill'?
Let me see if I get this straight.
Sixty people in a controlled study is not enough to be 'meaningful'.
Yet a bunch of anecdotes coming from you and some of your coworkers is significant? Bizarre.
You're right that diesel doesn't explode, and tanks have a lot of other explosive junk onboard, but I can't decide why you posted it. Hydrogen is not particularly dangerous either. Hindenburg went up in flames because it was painted with thermite.