I am working in Europe for a large US software firm (based in Seattle). Last week a US based contact told me that he hadn't returned my calls as he had to figure out how to dial internationally!
There was a story a few months back on CNN about a proposal to move the whole earth as a survival strategy. This would have involved making repeated passes near earth by an asteroid on the order of 75km in size.
At one pass every 6000 years they felt the planet could be moved about 60million km, and give another 5 billion years or so in the 'habitable zone'.
It is to be hoped that any revenge attacks (because that is what they will be) will be better thought out than the last ones against Bin Laden (or whoever is blamed for this atrocity.
The last cruise strikes against a Sudanese chemical factory that turned out to be innocent and a few innefectual attacks at camps in Afghanistan is not the way to ensure that this sort of thing happens again. fighting fire with fire just gets everyone burned.
I hope some thought is given to looking at what so enrages a person that they are willing to give their life and take thousands of others for some reason.
Having broken my heart getting cross browser compatible sites to work I can tell you that if they ever want this to work with a range of browsers then this functionality needs to be there from the off. Its a bitch to get these things to work after the event. You end up dumbing down functionality unless you want to end up with completely seperate sites for each browser family.
I haven't checked out the site but I'd say that if it ain't cross browser compatible now, its not going to be without a rebuild.
I stand corrected, I meant to say metallic. And iron of course would be considerably more likely. Its one of those things the spell checker don't catch, and at this hour of the night neither does my brain:-)
so it's just a matter of time before NASA will have to deflect or destroy an incoming asteroid lest it destroy some part of us
Well I suppose it is a matter of time, but we could be talking throusands or even millions of years here.
Only nickel core objects can make it to the ground (everything else explodes in the upper athmosphere). These are rare enough. So a very large object would be needed before a big Megaton force blast is felt on the ground. And based on the size of the objects and how often these hit, the mean time between earth impact is large. On the order of thousands of years.
Personally, I don't think its something that is likely to happen in my life time. That said all these sky surveys for Near Earth Objects is to correctly assess the risk. The current margin of error in the calculations is large.
Then again I could get squashed by a giant falling rock before I fini
what better way to make contact than to cause an unexplainable error
I would have said a better way was to send a direct signal or even turn up in person. Certainly something better than an ambiguous hard to measure, might not be there, drift in probe position.
I would argue that EU govenrments are much closer to the people and implement laws that are closer to what the people want than the US.
The vast majority of Europeans are quite happy with our gun laws and the related lack of widespread gun violence in our societies.
I fail to see the link between Mad Cow Disease and firearms. BSE is a symptom of intensive agriculture policies, questionable vet advice and a government (UK) cock up rather than anything else.
The anti-nazi laws again are driven by the public. We have good reason accross Europe to implement laws that prohibit incitement to hatered.
And to top it all besides European countries are much more relaxed about drugs, sex and religion than the US. And that is reflected in our laws too.
One of the saner provisions of this is that you can make limited numbers of personal copies of mateerial. So the police will not be breaking down my front door to seize my mp3 collection.
That said, the Soviet pilots got a visual ID before they fired, so they knew it was a civilian aircraft.
It happened at night so the Soviet pilot would have been unable to distinguish between a civilian and a military Boeing. As for window lighting, asuming he wasn't coming from behind or below he couldn't necessarily know that military aircraft don't have lit side windows as well.
No one says we are the only cause. But human activity is causing these things to happen much faster than they would normally. The temperature rises in the last 200 years are faster than anything that has been seen since the end of the last ice age.
The recent global conference on climate change and global warming was quite clear that nuclear power is not the way to go. Leaving aside the emotive issues around "meltdowns" and nuclear safety, it is just un-economic. The cost of nuclear power per mega-watt hour is considerable higher than most other forms of power generation. This is driven by the high comissioning costs of the power stations and their high operating costs. And no one fully understands how much they are going to cost to fully decomission as the waste products will have to be stored for a time period longer than western civilization (or any other civilization on this planet) has been around. This is the other big negative against nuclear power. It is difficult to advocate a power source that will leave a waste product that has the potential to poison the environment of our distant decendants.
Currently there are no sure ways of handling this waste. We have no experience at all of how to store something safely for tens of thousands of years.
And these are the reasons why nowhere in the industrial west are new nuclear power stations being built. Even with the growing (certainty) of global warming.
I notice that there are a number of white "spots" below the great spot at about the latitude the Schumacher Levy 9 fragments impacted. does anyone know if these could be remenants of the impacts?
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Re:PC is hardly dead - but it may not be very well
on
Vanishing Game Genres
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· Score: 1
PC games are struggling as what is popular is arcade and action type games. For these you don't need a PC so this is where the consoles clean up.
The PC works best for games with greater depth, like Sim City, Civilization, hard core flight sims and the like. But it's a smaller market so developers don't get kudos from their shareholders for going there
So far there have been two types of explorer on other planets. The sit there in one spot ones and a few simple rovers. Like you said these are very complicated to operate.
On a regular basis people suggest great ideas for explorers, including baloons, flyers, submarines (for Europa) long distance autonomous rovers and now a helicopter. The reality is that all these are currently well beyond our current cababilities. Even on earth the most advanced machines I have seen tested have been rovers that have a significant human input into their control.
And this provides an argument for humans going to some of these places (certainly the moon and Mars. I'd accept that Titan and Europa would be stretch targets for the moment:-). Putting a human in the loop gives you realtime intelligent control and much greater levels of flexibility. The question is whether this is out weighed by the increased levels of complexity requried to support the person.
Not more government, but better. Ask yourself who is controlling the one you have. How much do you feel you can influence the government's policies over the industries with the big lobbying funds.
This is probably the greater difference between Euro and US governments. European governments are more accountable to the people that elected them. And so their policies closer reflect what the people want. The result is the people are more supportive of government actions.
I am always amazed by the amount of (apparant) hostility that US citizens seem to display to their Government. Is this because they feel it's not their government at all?
Not really, when you count the huge launch and development costs. And quite often there is nothing wrong with an old sat other than it has run out of fuel. A few months back there was some news about NASA (I think) developing a robot to carry out refueling as a cheap way of extending satelite lifetimes.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.jamstec.go.jp/jamstec-e/odinfo/sdsrepor t.html
I am working in Europe for a large US software firm (based in Seattle). Last week a US based contact told me that he hadn't returned my calls as he had to figure out how to dial internationally!
There is good (wave) surfing locally too at Lahinch (busy), Spanish point and further south at White Strand.
At one pass every 6000 years they felt the planet could be moved about 60million km, and give another 5 billion years or so in the 'habitable zone'.
I agree caution is called for.
Revenge is not justice
The last cruise strikes against a Sudanese chemical factory that turned out to be innocent and a few innefectual attacks at camps in Afghanistan is not the way to ensure that this sort of thing happens again. fighting fire with fire just gets everyone burned.
I hope some thought is given to looking at what so enrages a person that they are willing to give their life and take thousands of others for some reason.
I haven't checked out the site but I'd say that if it ain't cross browser compatible now, its not going to be without a rebuild.
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If I remember right an entire Iraqi Republican Gurad division was 'lost' for a while at the height of Gulf war.
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I stand corrected, I meant to say metallic. And iron of course would be considerably more likely. Its one of those things the spell checker don't catch, and at this hour of the night neither does my brain :-)
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Well I suppose it is a matter of time, but we could be talking throusands or even millions of years here.
Only nickel core objects can make it to the ground (everything else explodes in the upper athmosphere). These are rare enough. So a very large object would be needed before a big Megaton force blast is felt on the ground. And based on the size of the objects and how often these hit, the mean time between earth impact is large. On the order of thousands of years.
Personally, I don't think its something that is likely to happen in my life time. That said all these sky surveys for Near Earth Objects is to correctly assess the risk. The current margin of error in the calculations is large.
Then again I could get squashed by a giant falling rock before I fini
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I would have said a better way was to send a direct signal or even turn up in person. Certainly something better than an ambiguous hard to measure, might not be there, drift in probe position.
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"The capsule shows extensive blackening and scorching from re-entry with minor faults as would be expected. "
I am not so sure. High mileage, some bodywork damage. Is it still covered by the anti-rust warranty?
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The vast majority of Europeans are quite happy with our gun laws and the related lack of widespread gun violence in our societies.
I fail to see the link between Mad Cow Disease and firearms. BSE is a symptom of intensive agriculture policies, questionable vet advice and a government (UK) cock up rather than anything else.
The anti-nazi laws again are driven by the public. We have good reason accross Europe to implement laws that prohibit incitement to hatered.
And to top it all besides European countries are much more relaxed about drugs, sex and religion than the US. And that is reflected in our laws too.
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Ahhh, but the only way to get in is to become one of them. And to do that you have to sell your soul to the 'vested interests'.
Power corrupts, etc. etc.
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One of the saner provisions of this is that you can make limited numbers of personal copies of mateerial. So the police will not be breaking down my front door to seize my mp3 collection.
-----------------------------
It happened at night so the Soviet pilot would have been unable to distinguish between a civilian and a military Boeing. As for window lighting, asuming he wasn't coming from behind or below he couldn't necessarily know that military aircraft don't have lit side windows as well.
-----------------------------
No one says we are the only cause. But human activity is causing these things to happen much faster than they would normally. The temperature rises in the last 200 years are faster than anything that has been seen since the end of the last ice age.
-----------------------------
Currently there are no sure ways of handling this waste. We have no experience at all of how to store something safely for tens of thousands of years.
And these are the reasons why nowhere in the industrial west are new nuclear power stations being built. Even with the growing (certainty) of global warming.
-----------------------------
I notice that there are a number of white "spots" below the great spot at about the latitude the Schumacher Levy 9 fragments impacted. does anyone know if these could be remenants of the impacts?
-----------------------------
The PC works best for games with greater depth, like Sim City, Civilization, hard core flight sims and the like. But it's a smaller market so developers don't get kudos from their shareholders for going there
-----------------------------
On a regular basis people suggest great ideas for explorers, including baloons, flyers, submarines (for Europa) long distance autonomous rovers and now a helicopter. The reality is that all these are currently well beyond our current cababilities. Even on earth the most advanced machines I have seen tested have been rovers that have a significant human input into their control.
And this provides an argument for humans going to some of these places (certainly the moon and Mars. I'd accept that Titan and Europa would be stretch targets for the moment :-). Putting a human in the loop gives you realtime intelligent control and much greater levels of flexibility. The question is whether this is out weighed by the increased levels of complexity requried to support the person.
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So true, as it was designed to work for 5 years and is still going after 13. Very shoddy work
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This is probably the greater difference between Euro and US governments. European governments are more accountable to the people that elected them. And so their policies closer reflect what the people want. The result is the people are more supportive of government actions.
I am always amazed by the amount of (apparant) hostility that US citizens seem to display to their Government. Is this because they feel it's not their government at all?
-----------------------------
Not really, when you count the huge launch and development costs. And quite often there is nothing wrong with an old sat other than it has run out of fuel. A few months back there was some news about NASA (I think) developing a robot to carry out refueling as a cheap way of extending satelite lifetimes.
-----------------------------