Which brings up a few other questions besides technical limits of hard drives in space...
On airplanes they want electronics shut off during takeoff and landing. I would expect NASA to be no less stringent about 'spurious radiation' during takeoff and reentry, though probably more technical and perhaps more flexible if you shield carefully.
I also wonder what they think about 'little embedded gyroscopes' (hard drives) on the shuttle. Do they have to know about every one so they can account for it, are they just negligible, are they cumulative, or can you mount every other drive in the rack upside-down to cancel out righ-hand-rule effects?
There used to be a "Space Shuttle Operators Manual" for publicity/potential customers. I believe the local library has one, so I should check out the 'electronics restrictions' section.
Is the cost/subsidy question really that far out of whack? ($250 non-ink-subsidized price vs $50 current price.)
If so, you're probably right. If it's really about half that, then things could change. Some SMART printer maker could advertise cheaper ink as part of the more expensive printer, and I think enough consumers would understand in order to make it a profitable line.
IMHO, the perfection of the mirror may be irrelevant, or at least nearly so.
The 'desired imperfection' of the mirror is that it's moving away from the light source, and that it can be accelerated. If photons were to bounce off of a perfect mirror, coming back with the same intensity and color, ie: total energy, then there would be no net energy to have moved that mirror.
I haven't thought this completely through, but it would seem 'obvious' that the frequency of the reflected light should be lower, signifying that energy has been transferred to the sail. (The intensity would be lowered because the sail is an imperfect mirror.) But in this light, I'm not sure what the story would be reflecting light off of a moving, but non-accelerating mirror. OT1H, it would seem that the velocity of the mirror would drop the frequency of the reflected photons. OTOH, since the photons didn't accelerate the mirror, and their frequency dropped, where did the energy go? OTGH, since we fixed the velocity of the mirror, perhaps that energy was dissipated as heat against the mechanism we used to do that.
Which finally leaves me wondering about the backside of the sail. I guess this works because the light from the Sun is non-random on one side, and starlight is random on all sides. Makes one wonder, a: how far from a star is this usable, b: can 'shaping' the sail somehow get net momentum out of starlight, or farther from a star?
But store cards _are_ meant specifically for tracking your activity. In our town, at the same time as they deployed store cards they also added coupon printers. IMHO, the two are linked. They know what you've been buying, how strong your brand loyalties are, and print custom coupons for you. I have little doubt those coupons are designed to influence your purchasing, as much as it can be, to improve the profitability of the store.
Of course we refused to get one of them, just another thing to store and fumble with, besides the tracking aspect. The store claims a discount for using it, but when it comes time to cash out, when we don't have one, the cashier either uses her own, or borrows one from the previous customer. Not a bad idea really, because it also dilutes the 'facts' being collected.
See if you can find "Beyond Rangoon" at the video store. Of course it's only a movie - a work of political fiction. But since watching it, I note when Burma is in the news, and nothing I've heard discredits the tone of the movie. Where reviews may pan it, they do so for 'movie reasons', not for factual/background ones. Large-scale monitoring, with all of the sinister connotations, fits in.
Which was precisely my point of preferring Democrats in office. Not that I necessarily prefer the Democrat agenda to the Republican agenda - I just prefer that NO agenda get too much sway. The Democrats at least tend to debate, and for a long time now, the Republicans in Congress pretty much Dance the Party Line. IMHO if Congress isn't engaging in debate, then the decision has already been made in some back-room out of public sight.
As a transplanted (25 years) Vermonter, I'll have to give Howard Dean a mixed review.
On the positive side, the guy tends to be a fiscal conservative, and can be BLUNT. I can't say if its an exact quote, but I seem to remember him using words like "irresponsible" and "idiotic" to describe members of the legislature, and those were members of his own party. It's about time we had someone in the Oval Office capable of being both direct and subtle.
On the negative side, there were some oddities about how Act 60 got through for school funding, and we're still fighting those battles. Vermont still has a lot of tension between business and environment, growth and quality-of-life.
As for Civil Unions, I guess I have to take the "so conservative I look liberal" stance and say, "My bedroom is none of your business, and your bedroom is none of mine!"
Dean is a bit of an autocrat, and has some difficulty working with a legislature. I count that as somewhat positive, because I don't like my government to do too much. As a hard line middle-of-the-roader, I tend to prefer Democrats in office because there IS more contention, and less gets done. With sufficient concentration of power, Republicans are too efficient and too much gets done. Much as they decry 'activist government', that's what we've got now.
I also differentiated "boardroom safe" from "market safe". As cheap as it was, the Full Money was riskier than a moderately high-budget special-effects "traditional" Summer movie, at least from the boardroom perspective.
Neither of my examples was a 'great' movie, but both were good movies. Maybe they weren't that spectacular, but neither did they have giant budgets. Neither were "Hulks". (Which I want to see, as soon as it gets to cheap-seats.)
On a different vein, it's not so much any particular aspect of the American movie I'm against, it's the sameness, the 'safe-in-formula' approach studios seem to take. A dozen Full Monty's or Beckham's and I'd be sick of them, too.
When I say "Go outside the US," I guess I'm being unfair to the writers. I suspect if US execs went outside the US looking for scripts, they'd manage to find the same kind of stuff they find inside the US.
This past weekend my wife and I went to "Bend It Like Beckham," a wonderfully fun movie. At the same second-run theatre we saw that Matrix2 was there already, and XMen2 had been playing for a few weeks.
I'm convinced that it's a general problem with American business. First off, IMHO they believe that "business" is more important than other factors like talent and originality, and that a good manager can manage anything into profitability. Second, I don't really believe that they're even good businessmen, because a good businessman is willing to take a risk and make it work, or accept the consequences of failure. It's perceived as less "risky" to follow a franchise than to try something original, hence the collection of sequels and comic book adaptations.
Gee, these sound like the same problems hounding the music industry - promoting "safe" rehashes of the same old stuff.
But of course it's not really "safe", because movies are bombing and music sales are down. Oh wait, we can blame that on Internet piracy!
The real issue is that it depends on what you mean by the word, "safe," and not in a Clintonesque way. There's "safe" in the media boardrooms and meeting rooms, and there's "safe" in the marketplace. These days, there's little correlation.
Actually, "safe" in todays marketplace should mean taking risks, and that means that sometimes you'll bomb. But is that any worse than today's sequelmania? Consider that today's sequelmania is producing dismal results, is a bomb or two really that bad when originality will probably also bring some HITS?
Plus, as others have said, big budgets and special effects do not necessarily correlate with a good movie. "Bend It Like Beckham" looked pretty cheap to make, as did "The Full Monty" of a few years back. Good writing and good acting are much more important.
My brother holds that Microsoft's main technology, and the place where their real innovation happens, is in "business practices."
he's not there to look objectively at anything!
on
Bill Gates On Linux
·
· Score: 1
I beg to differ...
As "the leader of the company, he's not^H^H^H^H^H^H IS there to look objectively at an^H^Heverything!" He'd darned well better be on top of how Linux threatens Microsoft, or else he's incompetent.
OTOH, "the leader of the company, he's not there to look^H^H^H^Hspeak objectively at^Hbout anything1" He needs to know the threats, and know how to placate the market and paint his company in the best possible light, with respect to those threats.
OTGH, he needs to watch out exactly how far he stretches or shrinks the truth, because he is bound by SEC regulations, and is not supposed to mislead stockholders or analysts. It's a tightrope.
How practical is this? Are you speaking of a general IPPOTS that perhaps others could use, or a gateway just for your home, so you could drop Baby Bell or Long Distance POTS? Can you give a pointer on the general topic that won't show in the first few terms of a google search?
Does this mean we might get afs token forwarding for SSHV2? (I actually *read* the article, and couldn't glean that out of it.) Currently it appears to be possible to get afs token forwarding, but only for SSHV1. Proper token forwarding would enable ssh deployment in an afs shop.
Or with Kerberos authentication does token forwarding no longer matter, because it's not needed?
So I guess this means that I probably don't have to worry about Mirror Image filing suit if I were to (only hypothetically, of course,;-) ) run a Squid+IPTables transparent proxy at home.
Who's going to patent adding SquidGuard to that mix?
I recently saw where someone is going after pr0n sites for patent violation. Apparently they have a patent on some sort of graphic distribution scheme. If you're going to go after someone, at least go after someone with money, end everyone knows that pr0n is one of the few web business turning a profit.
That might be worth a try, next time I'm there, physically. I wouldn't try her out on a new mailer by phone.
But first I'd have to get Evolution running, myself. I've brought it up once or twice, but never really had it working, at least not with my home IMAP server. I haven't had much time to spend on it, either.
has been running Linux for several years now. I've tweaked and tuned it specifically for her needs.
She still has problems, but I suspect they're mostly pilot error. At the moment, she has a 73MB inbox, and Mozilla mail seems to be having some trouble with it. I'm not sure how you make a system proof against stuff like this. I've got it set to email the logfiles to me every week, and a few cron jobs to check the health (disk space, temperature, voltages, etc) and log that on a regular basis. I reset her Mozilla preferences every login, (in.Xclients) but there are just some things I can't do.
Supporting a senior citizen on a computer from a distance can be tough. My cousin (who lives in town, and is a Win-fan) put her on Windows for a while, when she was having hardware problems, and she had an even worse time. It's hard to know how to do best, but the ability to ssh in certainly helps.
Slashdot Mirror
So it contributes to the heat-death of the Universe?
Which brings up a few other questions besides technical limits of hard drives in space...
On airplanes they want electronics shut off during takeoff and landing. I would expect NASA to be no less stringent about 'spurious radiation' during takeoff and reentry, though probably more technical and perhaps more flexible if you shield carefully.
I also wonder what they think about 'little embedded gyroscopes' (hard drives) on the shuttle. Do they have to know about every one so they can account for it, are they just negligible, are they cumulative, or can you mount every other drive in the rack upside-down to cancel out righ-hand-rule effects?
There used to be a "Space Shuttle Operators Manual" for publicity/potential customers. I believe the local library has one, so I should check out the 'electronics restrictions' section.
Is the cost/subsidy question really that far out of whack? ($250 non-ink-subsidized price vs $50 current price.)
If so, you're probably right. If it's really about half that, then things could change. Some SMART printer maker could advertise cheaper ink as part of the more expensive printer, and I think enough consumers would understand in order to make it a profitable line.
Won't argue with that, but I'm just starting to wonder where the energy went when it got redshifted.
IMHO, the perfection of the mirror may be irrelevant, or at least nearly so.
The 'desired imperfection' of the mirror is that it's moving away from the light source, and that it can be accelerated. If photons were to bounce off of a perfect mirror, coming back with the same intensity and color, ie: total energy, then there would be no net energy to have moved that mirror.
I haven't thought this completely through, but it would seem 'obvious' that the frequency of the reflected light should be lower, signifying that energy has been transferred to the sail. (The intensity would be lowered because the sail is an imperfect mirror.) But in this light, I'm not sure what the story would be reflecting light off of a moving, but non-accelerating mirror. OT1H, it would seem that the velocity of the mirror would drop the frequency of the reflected photons. OTOH, since the photons didn't accelerate the mirror, and their frequency dropped, where did the energy go? OTGH, since we fixed the velocity of the mirror, perhaps that energy was dissipated as heat against the mechanism we used to do that.
Which finally leaves me wondering about the backside of the sail. I guess this works because the light from the Sun is non-random on one side, and starlight is random on all sides. Makes one wonder, a: how far from a star is this usable, b: can 'shaping' the sail somehow get net momentum out of starlight, or farther from a star?
But store cards _are_ meant specifically for tracking your activity. In our town, at the same time as they deployed store cards they also added coupon printers. IMHO, the two are linked. They know what you've been buying, how strong your brand loyalties are, and print custom coupons for you. I have little doubt those coupons are designed to influence your purchasing, as much as it can be, to improve the profitability of the store.
Of course we refused to get one of them, just another thing to store and fumble with, besides the tracking aspect. The store claims a discount for using it, but when it comes time to cash out, when we don't have one, the cashier either uses her own, or borrows one from the previous customer. Not a bad idea really, because it also dilutes the 'facts' being collected.
See if you can find "Beyond Rangoon" at the video store. Of course it's only a movie - a work of political fiction. But since watching it, I note when Burma is in the news, and nothing I've heard discredits the tone of the movie. Where reviews may pan it, they do so for 'movie reasons', not for factual/background ones. Large-scale monitoring, with all of the sinister connotations, fits in.
Which was precisely my point of preferring Democrats in office. Not that I necessarily prefer the Democrat agenda to the Republican agenda - I just prefer that NO agenda get too much sway. The Democrats at least tend to debate, and for a long time now, the Republicans in Congress pretty much Dance the Party Line. IMHO if Congress isn't engaging in debate, then the decision has already been made in some back-room out of public sight.
As a transplanted (25 years) Vermonter, I'll have to give Howard Dean a mixed review.
On the positive side, the guy tends to be a fiscal conservative, and can be BLUNT. I can't say if its an exact quote, but I seem to remember him using words like "irresponsible" and "idiotic" to describe members of the legislature, and those were members of his own party. It's about time we had someone in the Oval Office capable of being both direct and subtle.
On the negative side, there were some oddities about how Act 60 got through for school funding, and we're still fighting those battles. Vermont still has a lot of tension between business and environment, growth and quality-of-life.
As for Civil Unions, I guess I have to take the "so conservative I look liberal" stance and say, "My bedroom is none of your business, and your bedroom is none of mine!"
Dean is a bit of an autocrat, and has some difficulty working with a legislature. I count that as somewhat positive, because I don't like my government to do too much. As a hard line middle-of-the-roader, I tend to prefer Democrats in office because there IS more contention, and less gets done. With sufficient concentration of power, Republicans are too efficient and too much gets done. Much as they decry 'activist government', that's what we've got now.
Both of which seem to have been 'over-anticipated' in retrospect. I guess they both made money, but neither really made fans happy.
I guess a Fan and his money are soon parted.
I also differentiated "boardroom safe" from "market safe". As cheap as it was, the Full Money was riskier than a moderately high-budget special-effects "traditional" Summer movie, at least from the boardroom perspective.
Neither of my examples was a 'great' movie, but both were good movies. Maybe they weren't that spectacular, but neither did they have giant budgets. Neither were "Hulks". (Which I want to see, as soon as it gets to cheap-seats.)
On a different vein, it's not so much any particular aspect of the American movie I'm against, it's the sameness, the 'safe-in-formula' approach studios seem to take. A dozen Full Monty's or Beckham's and I'd be sick of them, too.
You took the words...
When I say "Go outside the US," I guess I'm being unfair to the writers. I suspect if US execs went outside the US looking for scripts, they'd manage to find the same kind of stuff they find inside the US.
You've made my point, better.
from just about anywhere but the USofA.
This past weekend my wife and I went to "Bend It Like Beckham," a wonderfully fun movie. At the same second-run theatre we saw that Matrix2 was there already, and XMen2 had been playing for a few weeks.
I'm convinced that it's a general problem with American business. First off, IMHO they believe that "business" is more important than other factors like talent and originality, and that a good manager can manage anything into profitability. Second, I don't really believe that they're even good businessmen, because a good businessman is willing to take a risk and make it work, or accept the consequences of failure. It's perceived as less "risky" to follow a franchise than to try something original, hence the collection of sequels and comic book adaptations.
Gee, these sound like the same problems hounding the music industry - promoting "safe" rehashes of the same old stuff.
But of course it's not really "safe", because movies are bombing and music sales are down. Oh wait, we can blame that on Internet piracy!
The real issue is that it depends on what you mean by the word, "safe," and not in a Clintonesque way. There's "safe" in the media boardrooms and meeting rooms, and there's "safe" in the marketplace. These days, there's little correlation.
Actually, "safe" in todays marketplace should mean taking risks, and that means that sometimes you'll bomb. But is that any worse than today's sequelmania? Consider that today's sequelmania is producing dismal results, is a bomb or two really that bad when originality will probably also bring some HITS?
Plus, as others have said, big budgets and special effects do not necessarily correlate with a good movie. "Bend It Like Beckham" looked pretty cheap to make, as did "The Full Monty" of a few years back. Good writing and good acting are much more important.
My brother holds that Microsoft's main technology, and the place where their real innovation happens, is in "business practices."
I beg to differ...
As "the leader of the company, he's not^H^H^H^H^H^H IS there to look objectively at an^H^Heverything!" He'd darned well better be on top of how Linux threatens Microsoft, or else he's incompetent.
OTOH, "the leader of the company, he's not there to look^H^H^H^Hspeak objectively at^Hbout anything1" He needs to know the threats, and know how to placate the market and paint his company in the best possible light, with respect to those threats.
OTGH, he needs to watch out exactly how far he stretches or shrinks the truth, because he is bound by SEC regulations, and is not supposed to mislead stockholders or analysts. It's a tightrope.
How practical is this?
Are you speaking of a general IPPOTS that perhaps others could use, or a gateway just for your home, so you could drop Baby Bell or Long Distance POTS?
Can you give a pointer on the general topic that won't show in the first few terms of a google search?
I guess now I know that I'm in the process of putting in a *comical* home network.
You mean like when your wife says, "This ought to be a half-hour job."
Does this mean we might get afs token forwarding for SSHV2? (I actually *read* the article, and couldn't glean that out of it.) Currently it appears to be possible to get afs token forwarding, but only for SSHV1. Proper token forwarding would enable ssh deployment in an afs shop.
Or with Kerberos authentication does token forwarding no longer matter, because it's not needed?
So I guess this means that I probably don't have to worry about Mirror Image filing suit if I were to (only hypothetically, of course, ;-) ) run a Squid+IPTables transparent proxy at home.
Who's going to patent adding SquidGuard to that mix?
I recently saw where someone is going after pr0n sites for patent violation. Apparently they have a patent on some sort of graphic distribution scheme. If you're going to go after someone, at least go after someone with money, end everyone knows that pr0n is one of the few web business turning a profit.
(specific reference forgotten)
How about over a 28.8k (on a dry day) phone line?
That might be worth a try, next time I'm there, physically. I wouldn't try her out on a new mailer by phone.
But first I'd have to get Evolution running, myself. I've brought it up once or twice, but never really had it working, at least not with my home IMAP server. I haven't had much time to spend on it, either.
Would they accept patches in denim? She used to patch the knees of my jeans when I was a kid.
has been running Linux for several years now. I've tweaked and tuned it specifically for her needs.
.Xclients) but there are just some things I can't do.
She still has problems, but I suspect they're mostly pilot error. At the moment, she has a 73MB inbox, and Mozilla mail seems to be having some trouble with it. I'm not sure how you make a system proof against stuff like this. I've got it set to email the logfiles to me every week, and a few cron jobs to check the health (disk space, temperature, voltages, etc) and log that on a regular basis. I reset her Mozilla preferences every login, (in
Supporting a senior citizen on a computer from a distance can be tough. My cousin (who lives in town, and is a Win-fan) put her on Windows for a while, when she was having hardware problems, and she had an even worse time. It's hard to know how to do best, but the ability to ssh in certainly helps.