Could Apollo 13 have been brought back if people had said on day one "There's just nothing we can do"? That's what NASA has done in this case.
Well, if they had all died right away they might have. As it is there isn't much point in figuring out ways they could have come back. They should be spending the time figuring out how to detect damage that would cause reentry problems, so they will know BEFORE everybody is dead that they need to do something differently.
Call me ignorant of space walking, but I'm suprised at how much danger they assign to stunts like transfering crew between shuttles or from the shuttle to the IIS without the proper equipment.
Just exactly how hard is it to get in an EV suit, tie a rope for safety, and jump across? The bays are enormous, and there is no wind or gravity to account for. If you miss, you go back and try again.
The drag at that altitude and above Mach 1.0 becomes less
It seems that a large, non-aerodynamic chunk of foam with no thrust would very quickly drop to subsonic speeds. I know very little about mach aerodynamics, but I'd think that an objects rate of deceleration would be greater from just over mach 1 to just below mach 1 than it would be at subsonic speeds.
although bringing your own *barcodes* on adhesive labels might work for some things
Particularly random weight (ie, sold by the pound) goods like meat, the price is usually encoded into the barcode. The first part will be an item class code, the second part is the price, as calculated by the actual weight of the item. Its trivial to print some new tags using whatever symbology the store uses and stick it on top of the existing label.
You'd have to be pretty damn cheap to go to the trouble of printing new tags for your meat just to save a few bucks though.
Re:They help, and they hurt.
on
Steal This Idea
·
· Score: 1
Even if the little guy could easily get a patent for a reasonable sum, any large corporation could copy his idea and tie him up in court until all his profit from the idea would be used up. He'd be better off settling out of court by licensing the patent to the large corp.
I don't think there is a solution to this, orgs with lots of resources can usually win over orgs with few resources, presuming compentency on both sides.
Remember that 'invention' for hair styling called the 'topsy tail'? Its a basicly a 20cm plastic needle with a large, springy eye, handy for threading hair into interesting styles. The inventors spent most of their time and money fighting off copycats. For an invention that should never have been given a patent in the first place, IMO.
Re:Like anything else ...
on
Steal This Idea
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
n abbreviated form of the language with a weaker grammatical structure and a lower information-carrying capacity.
Interesting. While I'm not dealing with any teenagers at the moment, so I don't know what slang they are developing, I'm not so sure the dialects I've come across have any less information carrying capacity than the subset of standard spoken english that they would use if they didn't have their slang.
I think that it might be less that the developed dialect not having the capacity and more that the typical set of ideas in the sub-culture is limited. That is to say, they ain't got nuttin to talk about, so 'day ain't needin' all 'dem big words.
Hmm, combined with an earlier slashdoters suggestion for a legal language based on an english-like logical language that helps to eliminate ambiguities in legal documents, and a nice federal legal database, law could actually become something that normal humans could grok.
Therefore, it will never happen. Too many of the people in the system have too much to loose if machines can parse the law.
I think the point is that Meanie B can keep the work out of public archives simply pay paying the dollar, he never has to bring a lawsuit. Public archives won't touch the work if its listed as still copyrighted. They won't have time to track down whomever paid the buck and verify that they are indeed the copyright holder.
Suppose Joe Blow steps up and pays the $1 for a work that isn't his to legally renew?
When he steps up, he has to prove that he holds the copyright. Then he pays the dollar. If at some point someone sues someone else over the work, they can figure it out them. The point is to get all the stuff that has been forgotten into the public domain. If someone is interested enough in a work to go to the trouble of claiming to be the copyright holder and paying the buck, more power to them, we would still see hundereds of thousands of works going into the public domain.
You know, its interesting. For the last couple of years I lived in a small town in south Texas. Lots of mexican influence. I got so that being incredibly cheap seemed normal. Nearly verything around me had exactly one thing in common. It was done as cheaply as possible. Not as cheaply as practical, as cheaply as possible.
Car bodies repaired with duct tape. leaking roofs repaired with a pot to catch the drips. Mobile homes so delapidated I was amazed even the many dogs would consider them home, much less the 9 people living there (no, I'm not joking). People living in the projects, driving cars older than me, with brand-new 60" plasma screen HDTV's with 600 digital channels in a living room, illuminated by a bare lightbulb and decorated with a moldering second-hand couch, a bong and numerous beer cans.
I hate cheap. I hate Supersized value meals. I hate tract housing, cheap apartments and cubicles with flimsy desks. I hate pressed wood furnature and cheap toys.
When I moved up north and got a real job, I vowed I'd never support those things again. I pay for real wood furnature and quality glassware. I refuse to buy anything that is not fine quality and built to last at least as long as me.
It costs me 5 times as much, and I have far fewer things, but damnit, they are _nice_ things, and I don't have to throw them away.
According to one Discovery channel special many of the communities that have been there for thousands of years are in those particular locations because none of the areas anywhere nearby are suitable, even if the government helps build the houses. The land can't support the population.
Not that I have any knowledge about it, or, frankly, care. There are a billion people over there, and I'm sure they can handle their own problems without the input of random slashdotters.
There's something strange with the Altamont site that is causing the problem
It could be a combination of the facts that the site had 10 to 2000 times as many turbines (5000+) as the other sites, the study was 5 times as long (13 years) as many of the other studies, and is located in a grassland area which as an unusually high density of these birds.
Re:Hehe Neat
on
ClusterKnoppix
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Mosix works like a big SMP box, no special code is required, so you just fork and forget.
I can see that that would be extremely cool for processing, but (and excuse my ignorance here), how does this apply to things like network servers? Can I install apache on it and get the benefits of multiple servers without having to do any special configuration? What about database servers?
For now, 10-50 is plenty for most groups of online friends.
It would be except that my 10 friends each have 10 friends who are not my friends and with whom I have no desire to communicate. And they each have 10 friends...
I haven't used it, but it would be useful to be able to use the same system to connect to multiple independent sets of people, like maintaining multiple connections to IRC servers.
EVERYONE has overlooked the bandwidth cap option in Kazaa's preferences
Mod parent up. As far as I have seen, every major P2P client lets you configure the max up and downstream bandwidth it takes, and if it is allowed to be promoted to super/ultra/whatever peer (accepts thousands of connections and acts as a hub, using pretty significant memory and processor resources to route search requests).
I regularly run my p2p client 24/7 with the bandwidth fairly severly limited, it doesn't make a significant impact on my network performance. but I also get a fair number of download requests, so I'm still serving files.
The flat rate electric plan I was on in Texas let you pay your average over the last year. If your acutual usage goes over or under, you are either refunded or billed extra over the next billing period. You paid for what you used either way, it just smoothed out the seasonal variation so it was easier to budget for.
Its not silly at all, its simply another imperfect layer in a multi-layered security model. It forces the user to do a little more work to get connected.
Only really crappy admins just throw up their hands and give up when confronted with blocking p2p. It can't be done perfectly, but it can be done very effectively.
If an ISP switched to metering, people would go elsewhere
This is pretty easy to remedy. You just charge a flat rate up to some more-than-reasonable data limit, like 1 or 2Gb per day average for the billing period. This is more than enough for 90% of broadband users. When they exceed that average for the billing period, start charging for the extra.
Make sure that its very easy for people to check what their total usage is, project what it will be if they continue using their connection as they are, and allow them to control their own connection throttle so they won't go over (but don't get cut off).
Normal users will never see the limits, high bandwith users will pay for their expensive habits. This is exactly how it should be. They can even encourage high bandwith users to stay by allowing 'servers'. Since they will be paying for bandwith, there shouldn't be a problem with running high traffic sites.
If ISPs would charge users for the bandwidth they use, it wouldn't matter what protocols take what bandwidth.
Naturally most users will want a flat rate, like they have now, so the simple solution is to charge a flat rate up to X gb transfer per billing period, and N dollars per gig after that.
Of course if they do that, they'll need to remove their 'server' restrictions and let those who want to host servers do so.
When bandwidth usage goes up, the ISP will make more money on service fees so they can buy more capacity. Its a pretty basic business concept.
Wow, I don't know if I should think of those people as hypocritical or realistic. I mean, beef burger, horse burger, whats the difference? On the other hand, opposing beef for food isn't going to get you anywhere.
Are there any cameras that record the frequency and the intensity/energy of incoming photons? So instead of filtering out everything except for R, G, B or infrared, you could post-process the data later to get whatever color planes you wanted? You could get better resolution than RGB (or fewer exposures), and not have to deal with hardware filters.
Slashdot Mirror
Could Apollo 13 have been brought back if people had said on day one "There's just nothing we can do"? That's what NASA has done in this case.
Well, if they had all died right away they might have. As it is there isn't much point in figuring out ways they could have come back. They should be spending the time figuring out how to detect damage that would cause reentry problems, so they will know BEFORE everybody is dead that they need to do something differently.
Call me ignorant of space walking, but I'm suprised at how much danger they assign to stunts like transfering crew between shuttles or from the shuttle to the IIS without the proper equipment.
Just exactly how hard is it to get in an EV suit, tie a rope for safety, and jump across? The bays are enormous, and there is no wind or gravity to account for. If you miss, you go back and try again.
The drag at that altitude and above Mach 1.0 becomes less
It seems that a large, non-aerodynamic chunk of foam with no thrust would very quickly drop to subsonic speeds. I know very little about mach aerodynamics, but I'd think that an objects rate of deceleration would be greater from just over mach 1 to just below mach 1 than it would be at subsonic speeds.
although bringing your own *barcodes* on adhesive labels might work for some things
Particularly random weight (ie, sold by the pound) goods like meat, the price is usually encoded into the barcode. The first part will be an item class code, the second part is the price, as calculated by the actual weight of the item. Its trivial to print some new tags using whatever symbology the store uses and stick it on top of the existing label.
You'd have to be pretty damn cheap to go to the trouble of printing new tags for your meat just to save a few bucks though.
Even if the little guy could easily get a patent for a reasonable sum, any large corporation could copy his idea and tie him up in court until all his profit from the idea would be used up. He'd be better off settling out of court by licensing the patent to the large corp.
I don't think there is a solution to this, orgs with lots of resources can usually win over orgs with few resources, presuming compentency on both sides.
Remember that 'invention' for hair styling called the 'topsy tail'? Its a basicly a 20cm plastic needle with a large, springy eye, handy for threading hair into interesting styles. The inventors spent most of their time and money fighting off copycats. For an invention that should never have been given a patent in the first place, IMO.
n abbreviated form of the language with a weaker grammatical structure and a lower information-carrying capacity.
Interesting. While I'm not dealing with any teenagers at the moment, so I don't know what slang they are developing, I'm not so sure the dialects I've come across have any less information carrying capacity than the subset of standard spoken english that they would use if they didn't have their slang.
I think that it might be less that the developed dialect not having the capacity and more that the typical set of ideas in the sub-culture is limited. That is to say, they ain't got nuttin to talk about, so 'day ain't needin' all 'dem big words.
Hmm, combined with an earlier slashdoters suggestion for a legal language based on an english-like logical language that helps to eliminate ambiguities in legal documents, and a nice federal legal database, law could actually become something that normal humans could grok.
Therefore, it will never happen. Too many of the people in the system have too much to loose if machines can parse the law.
I think the point is that Meanie B can keep the work out of public archives simply pay paying the dollar, he never has to bring a lawsuit. Public archives won't touch the work if its listed as still copyrighted. They won't have time to track down whomever paid the buck and verify that they are indeed the copyright holder.
Suppose Joe Blow steps up and pays the $1 for a work that isn't his to legally renew?
When he steps up, he has to prove that he holds the copyright. Then he pays the dollar. If at some point someone sues someone else over the work, they can figure it out them. The point is to get all the stuff that has been forgotten into the public domain. If someone is interested enough in a work to go to the trouble of claiming to be the copyright holder and paying the buck, more power to them, we would still see hundereds of thousands of works going into the public domain.
You know, its interesting. For the last couple of years I lived in a small town in south Texas. Lots of mexican influence. I got so that being incredibly cheap seemed normal. Nearly verything around me had exactly one thing in common. It was done as cheaply as possible. Not as cheaply as practical, as cheaply as possible.
Car bodies repaired with duct tape. leaking roofs repaired with a pot to catch the drips. Mobile homes so delapidated I was amazed even the many dogs would consider them home, much less the 9 people living there (no, I'm not joking). People living in the projects, driving cars older than me, with brand-new 60" plasma screen HDTV's with 600 digital channels in a living room, illuminated by a bare lightbulb and decorated with a moldering second-hand couch, a bong and numerous beer cans.
I hate cheap. I hate Supersized value meals. I hate tract housing, cheap apartments and cubicles with flimsy desks. I hate pressed wood furnature and cheap toys.
When I moved up north and got a real job, I vowed I'd never support those things again. I pay for real wood furnature and quality glassware. I refuse to buy anything that is not fine quality and built to last at least as long as me.
It costs me 5 times as much, and I have far fewer things, but damnit, they are _nice_ things, and I don't have to throw them away.
oops, was I ranting again. sorry, my bad.
According to one Discovery channel special many of the communities that have been there for thousands of years are in those particular locations because none of the areas anywhere nearby are suitable, even if the government helps build the houses. The land can't support the population.
Not that I have any knowledge about it, or, frankly, care. There are a billion people over there, and I'm sure they can handle their own problems without the input of random slashdotters.
There's something strange with the Altamont site that is causing the problem
It could be a combination of the facts that the site had 10 to 2000 times as many turbines (5000+) as the other sites, the study was 5 times as long (13 years) as many of the other studies, and is located in a grassland area which as an unusually high density of these birds.
Hey, are you a lotus notes user too?
Mosix works like a big SMP box, no special code is required, so you just fork and forget.
I can see that that would be extremely cool for processing, but (and excuse my ignorance here), how does this apply to things like network servers? Can I install apache on it and get the benefits of multiple servers without having to do any special configuration? What about database servers?
For now, 10-50 is plenty for most groups of online friends.
It would be except that my 10 friends each have 10 friends who are not my friends and with whom I have no desire to communicate. And they each have 10 friends...
I haven't used it, but it would be useful to be able to use the same system to connect to multiple independent sets of people, like maintaining multiple connections to IRC servers.
EVERYONE has overlooked the bandwidth cap option in Kazaa's preferences
Mod parent up. As far as I have seen, every major P2P client lets you configure the max up and downstream bandwidth it takes, and if it is allowed to be promoted to super/ultra/whatever peer (accepts thousands of connections and acts as a hub, using pretty significant memory and processor resources to route search requests).
I regularly run my p2p client 24/7 with the bandwidth fairly severly limited, it doesn't make a significant impact on my network performance. but I also get a fair number of download requests, so I'm still serving files.
The flat rate electric plan I was on in Texas let you pay your average over the last year. If your acutual usage goes over or under, you are either refunded or billed extra over the next billing period. You paid for what you used either way, it just smoothed out the seasonal variation so it was easier to budget for.
I know that several of them have 80%+ of P2P traffic
Just curious, but do you know if any of them have tried limiting P2P usage to nighttime hours?
Its not silly at all, its simply another imperfect layer in a multi-layered security model. It forces the user to do a little more work to get connected.
Only really crappy admins just throw up their hands and give up when confronted with blocking p2p. It can't be done perfectly, but it can be done very effectively.
If an ISP switched to metering, people would go elsewhere
This is pretty easy to remedy. You just charge a flat rate up to some more-than-reasonable data limit, like 1 or 2Gb per day average for the billing period. This is more than enough for 90% of broadband users. When they exceed that average for the billing period, start charging for the extra.
Make sure that its very easy for people to check what their total usage is, project what it will be if they continue using their connection as they are, and allow them to control their own connection throttle so they won't go over (but don't get cut off).
Normal users will never see the limits, high bandwith users will pay for their expensive habits. This is exactly how it should be. They can even encourage high bandwith users to stay by allowing 'servers'. Since they will be paying for bandwith, there shouldn't be a problem with running high traffic sites.
If ISPs would charge users for the bandwidth they use, it wouldn't matter what protocols take what bandwidth.
Naturally most users will want a flat rate, like they have now, so the simple solution is to charge a flat rate up to X gb transfer per billing period, and N dollars per gig after that.
Of course if they do that, they'll need to remove their 'server' restrictions and let those who want to host servers do so.
When bandwidth usage goes up, the ISP will make more money on service fees so they can buy more capacity. Its a pretty basic business concept.
What lawyer is going to pursue a case where the fine is $500?
Well, could you file yourself in small claims court? What spammer could stay in business while dealing with hundreds of small claims cases every day?
horse meat is already illegal in california
Wow, I don't know if I should think of those people as hypocritical or realistic. I mean, beef burger, horse burger, whats the difference? On the other hand, opposing beef for food isn't going to get you anywhere.
Are there any cameras that record the frequency and the intensity/energy of incoming photons? So instead of filtering out everything except for R, G, B or infrared, you could post-process the data later to get whatever color planes you wanted? You could get better resolution than RGB (or fewer exposures), and not have to deal with hardware filters.
Thats a Philip K. Dick story isn't it?