In all seriousness we all know Captain Kirk will find a Klingon bird of pray, fly around the sun to go back in time to get some Wales and snicker bars, then fly out to the asteroid and offer the Snickers bars to the asteroid to get it to not destroy us, while scotty cooks up some wonderful roasted whale to celebrate the saving of the earth.
The problem is the US will decide that our solution is the best one and override suggestions or plans by any other nation. If France has a idea, and maybe even a better one then us, The US will say "fuck you" and do it our way. And since stopping it would be a one shot deal, thats not a good thing to have happen. It's probably a one shot deal cause if the first try to stop it messes up the way the thing is setup, it might mess up all the plans other groups have.
Me personally think that a hit that would posse good odds of destroying the world would be a great thing for world unity and get the whole planet to work as one to solve the problem, and maybe from that we can learn something.
Yeah, Han and the gang are going to trick Darth into moving the Deathstar right into the path of it. Then the DoD will claim it to be a Two for One event.
this thing wouldn't take out the world, it's about a 1/4 mile across or so. But it will be bad. Big hole, and sever damage in the area. If we are lucky it will hit texas.
Or maybe the Yucatan Peninsula, then we can find if Asteroids ever strikes the same place twice.
But thats the fun of shopping the ACME catalog. Sure you might die, but at least can get a good laugh out of your death.
Besides, you will just create a hole in the earth in the shape of the plane and you can climb back out. (while the parachute system ends up deploying after the crash, as happened in the article).
Oh course they failed at things. I bet the Pharaohs accountants just wrote of the bent pyramid as a Research and Development test.:)
It though come down to a mistake and a computer wouldn't have changed things. They simply didn't have all the knowledge of materials and so forth to know it wouldn't work. But also there is another culture in africa, just can't think of their names at the moment, that also built pyramids, small ones though, but extremely pointy. And I think they came before the Egyptian ones. So the Egyptians might have gone wrong just by copying them.
I rather agree with your current assessment of nasa, over caution is killing them. I personally think they need to punch hardware out like a Chevy. Sure it might break here and there, but odds are it will still go it's life and keep on working. But it cost next to nothing. I think the late 90s Faster Better Cheaper approach worked in many ways. Just didn't go all the way. Even the astronauts have said they would go with less safety if it meant more stuff happened. But unfortunately if any spacecraft currently has a problem, or a loss of life, it's big time news.
Space exploration has a similar problem to commercial aviation, but even more so. They are trying to make it as safe as possible, and thus aviation and space flight are now safer then life itself. You probably have better odds of getting killed sitting on your coach then you do in a plane or space ship.
Sadly, the time when you see things really get done fast and the right approach is taken is War, we advanced greatly in WWII cause stuff just needed to get done, and done now.
I know your being silly and all. I wasnt' saying technology was bad, or we should make sure everyone still knows how to carve a boat out of a tree with fire.
Just saying we have become really dependant on computers, and sometimes we have stopped learning even skills that we should be able to do without a computer.
I'm a firm beliver in we should advance society and eliminate needs for things, I think things like farming and manufacturing should be completely mechanized at this point. But at the same time i think everyone should know how to grow stuff from seed. Otherwise we have enslaved ourselves to technology.
well, they are unstable for the purpose of getting better performance, not to make the concept of planes to fly work. You can build a plane without a computer, and could achieve the same basic concepts, but it wouldn't do it as well.
Also, planes like the Stealth Bomber are said to not be able to fly without a computer for reasons like you mentioned, especially landing it. But really it's a issue of it makes it practical, not needed. The Northrop flying wing worked in the late 40s and it obviously had no computers. The B2 is based off that planes design (actually has the exact same wing span), the computers just made it more feasible and overall better.
In the case of going to the moon, it could be done without a computer, rockets went up without computers, plus people make a great computer. The computers for apollo did pretty straightforward stuff, and were mainly there so the astronauts didn't have to keep doing stuff non-stop. They could still sight stars and calculate there path and manual fire rockets to adjust (like they did in Apollo 13),
The thing is we have all gotten so used to doing stuff with a calculator that we forget you can do it without. When was the last time you did a square root by hand (or even remember how). I think this is the kind of thing that causes people to wonder how things like the pyramids were made, people just can't think of how to do things without modern tools, cause thats all they know. To the Egyptians building them probably wasn't that hard to figure out.
well, you could do it without computers, would just be even harder, plus astronauts would have one sucky time flying the craft by hand to the moon. But it could be done, there is always a way without a computer.
The other thing is they took a very simple approach to thing, to do it today would be even harder because we would over complex thing thing with uber redundancy and sensors for everything and so forth. Thus why we could get to the moon, or russians get space stations, but the space shuttle and space station suck.
Not that getting more computers involved is bad, it just makes it easier for things to crap out and not know why. Mechanical stuff is easy to figure out why it's not working, electrical not so much, and code and semiconductors very hard.
I too look at how we did it, am are amazed it all worked. But then, look at a Model T or a Steam Locomotive, today it seams amazing people would trust those thing cross country or that they would be very durable, but they did it just fine.
I'm pretty sure my powermac has failed on my more then my atari 800 ever did.
This has been around for a while, and I think everyone but the person who submitted this would agree it's hideous. This thing has been getting called ugly for a long time now.
I believe you can get them in the shipped to the US, but it ends up costing you like a 1000 bucks for the case. I've heard of some people placing bulk orders with them to get the price down.
I'm waiting for the first ASIMO to get on one of those Toyota Walker things from a few weeks ago. Robot riding a robot while killing us all, and with a Hello Kitty theme to the horror.
actualy, birds in the airstream just increases the massflow over the blades and can give the windmill some extra kick, bit like a water wheel:) And birds are a renewable resource.
Wouldn't you love to be an endaged species, especialy be a male of an endanged species, the whole expectation for you would be to mate as much as you possible can, for the good of your kind have as much sex as you possible can.
Anyways, the bird issue gets overblown, and is a pretty minor thing to worry about. Far as being unsightly, well, many (most) find them beautiful, not ugly, it's really up to the person. Cost isn't that bad, I can't say I have ever seen them near a coast, they typicaly end up on ridges of mountains, most of them i have ever seen where in wyoming and Colorado in the middle of no where.
I really like wind, and its one of the best alt. sources we have, but still it can be a basis for the grid, it can be there to be used when avalible, but you still need a constant source. For that we need lots and lots of nuke plants (the best source we have).
I saw an interesting thing one day on tv, They brought Jeff Gordon (nascar driver) and some Formula one driver (can't remember which), to Indy for the road course, they drove there cars around. Then they switched, Gordon got in the F1 car, the F1 guy in Gordons Nextel Cup car. Guess what happened?
In a few laps Gordon was pulling times just as good as the F1 guy was, dang close to the pole time for the track.
The F1 guy, not sure if it was Shoemaker but it was one of the names i knew and i don't follow F1. He was struggling, he just couldn't drive the car.
The reason, simple, F1 is all car, they have made it so easy on the driver it's basicly point and shoot, if you gave a lot of drivers a chance to drive one, they would do great, they just don't get a chance. But Nextel cup cars are designed to be hard to drive, it's about the driver, not the cars (equal cars in theory). Every year there are new rules added making them harder to drive, thus the skills needed go up even more. Sure the drivers don't look all flashy, they are not some thin euro guy trying to look cool, they are just families that have evolved doing that thing, and they really are very good drivers.
People want to diss Nextel cup cars cause they are low tech, on low tech tracks, well thats the whole idea, it's about drivers and stratgy, not shear spending the most money on a super car.
Problem with dictionary.com is it's a very poor dictionary with lots of things that arn't close to words, and a lot of far stretched definitions, it's like a wiki gone bad at times. I use it from time to time, but it's not something I would ever seriously use for a good number of definitions and such.
I think you are looking at this wrong like so many others. They bought IBMs PC devision, that will Lenovo will basicly become IBM PC devision. They will take up the quality IBM has, not bring down IBMs quality.
They did this to gain all the quality. Besides things like thinkpads arn't even designed much by IBM, it's some asian company that makes them for most everyone else.
I expect them to be much like when IBM spun off the printer devision which became lexmark. Lenovo will re-orginize, probably just scrap much of what they had. Probably rename under a new catchy name, and grow to be a big time player. People just don't think IBM when it comes to home computers anymore. They will go after that again which IBM has long since ditched.
I guess thing will now be listed as "Lenovo Compatible"
"I think Thinkpad and other IBM gadgets will decrease as much in quality under Lenovo as Volvo has decreased in quality under Ford's"
So quality is going to go massively up, and the computers will become very trendy and liked instead of mocked by the masses? Sales will increase, and people won't think of their products as boxes anymore.
No, its called people with taste. A retard would go to GAP and pay 50 bucks for a T-shirt witch a giant gab logo all over it, when they could get the same shirt without the GAP logo for 10 bucks at a differant store.
If you haven't noticed, the more highquality a product is, the less logo and badging it has on it. Simply because not slapping your logo all over things is part of quality. People will pay to not be some big tacky billboard for a product. If I'm making a purchase of a large price, i don't care how good something is if it looks like a turd, I'm not buying it. Why do you think apple can sell a monitor with same panel in it as other companies use who sell it for less? Simple, taste, they make it clean looking, and that sells.
Similar effect with cars, ever notice that cheap cars look ugly compaired to expensive cars, but the reality is it cost the same to make a car look beautiful as it does to make one look ugly, all the shape of the parts. And the more expensive ones do their looks with less.
Oh how about computer cases, look at Lian Li cases, they really arn't that great ( I own one, it's pretty sucky). But people will buy them anyways cause it's how you get a clean looking case. All I wanted was a cheap clean small box, but they don't exist, if you go cheap you get a over styled POS. To get a simple box you have to pay more.
This is the reality of the world. And as long as people like you decide to go for saving a few bucks to become a billboard for products, the world will be stuck in a rut of massive marketing in every freaking corner.
No, up until 1980 we had only amounted ~1 trillion dollars in debt (in about 200 years), and much of that was in the decade before, through most the history of the US we ran fairly well balanced budgets.
But then Reagan-nomics came in and jumped our debt up another 3-4 Trillion in 12 years. Between republican tax cuts and massive republican spending the thing fell apart. It did begin to get fixed by the late 90s after years a cutting waste in the gov. and some tax increases we were paying back the debt, then of course we got in our 2nd round of Reagan-nomics (voodoo economics as GHWB would call it).
Its apparently very easy to get people to think republicans are good with money, and that massive debts don't matter. Guess those people like paying ~25 cents on the dollar on their taxes just to pay interest on the debt.
Yeah, most all places have this. I really don't know what's up with this article cause most bigger towns have these systems already, not just trip sensors but ones that adapt based on traffic conditions.
I do wish San Jose would get even trip sensors, this place sucks, you just wait forever, doesn't help they have these idiotic left turn red arrows so you can't go left even when nothing is coming.
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Dude, Stargate isn't real.
In all seriousness we all know Captain Kirk will find a Klingon bird of pray, fly around the sun to go back in time to get some Wales and snicker bars, then fly out to the asteroid and offer the Snickers bars to the asteroid to get it to not destroy us, while scotty cooks up some wonderful roasted whale to celebrate the saving of the earth.
The problem is the US will decide that our solution is the best one and override suggestions or plans by any other nation. If France has a idea, and maybe even a better one then us, The US will say "fuck you" and do it our way. And since stopping it would be a one shot deal, thats not a good thing to have happen. It's probably a one shot deal cause if the first try to stop it messes up the way the thing is setup, it might mess up all the plans other groups have.
Me personally think that a hit that would posse good odds of destroying the world would be a great thing for world unity and get the whole planet to work as one to solve the problem, and maybe from that we can learn something.
Yeah, Han and the gang are going to trick Darth into moving the Deathstar right into the path of it. Then the DoD will claim it to be a Two for One event.
What makes you think they aren't one in the same?
this thing wouldn't take out the world, it's about a 1/4 mile across or so. But it will be bad. Big hole, and sever damage in the area. If we are lucky it will hit texas.
Or maybe the Yucatan Peninsula, then we can find if Asteroids ever strikes the same place twice.
But thats the fun of shopping the ACME catalog. Sure you might die, but at least can get a good laugh out of your death.
Besides, you will just create a hole in the earth in the shape of the plane and you can climb back out. (while the parachute system ends up deploying after the crash, as happened in the article).
Oh course they failed at things. I bet the Pharaohs accountants just wrote of the bent pyramid as a Research and Development test. :)
It though come down to a mistake and a computer wouldn't have changed things. They simply didn't have all the knowledge of materials and so forth to know it wouldn't work. But also there is another culture in africa, just can't think of their names at the moment, that also built pyramids, small ones though, but extremely pointy. And I think they came before the Egyptian ones. So the Egyptians might have gone wrong just by copying them.
I rather agree with your current assessment of nasa, over caution is killing them. I personally think they need to punch hardware out like a Chevy. Sure it might break here and there, but odds are it will still go it's life and keep on working. But it cost next to nothing. I think the late 90s Faster Better Cheaper approach worked in many ways. Just didn't go all the way. Even the astronauts have said they would go with less safety if it meant more stuff happened. But unfortunately if any spacecraft currently has a problem, or a loss of life, it's big time news.
Space exploration has a similar problem to commercial aviation, but even more so. They are trying to make it as safe as possible, and thus aviation and space flight are now safer then life itself. You probably have better odds of getting killed sitting on your coach then you do in a plane or space ship.
Sadly, the time when you see things really get done fast and the right approach is taken is War, we advanced greatly in WWII cause stuff just needed to get done, and done now.
I know your being silly and all. I wasnt' saying technology was bad, or we should make sure everyone still knows how to carve a boat out of a tree with fire.
Just saying we have become really dependant on computers, and sometimes we have stopped learning even skills that we should be able to do without a computer.
I'm a firm beliver in we should advance society and eliminate needs for things, I think things like farming and manufacturing should be completely mechanized at this point. But at the same time i think everyone should know how to grow stuff from seed. Otherwise we have enslaved ourselves to technology.
I think cell phones are in stage two right now, I just hope they get to stage 3 soon.
well, they are unstable for the purpose of getting better performance, not to make the concept of planes to fly work. You can build a plane without a computer, and could achieve the same basic concepts, but it wouldn't do it as well.
Also, planes like the Stealth Bomber are said to not be able to fly without a computer for reasons like you mentioned, especially landing it. But really it's a issue of it makes it practical, not needed. The Northrop flying wing worked in the late 40s and it obviously had no computers. The B2 is based off that planes design (actually has the exact same wing span), the computers just made it more feasible and overall better.
In the case of going to the moon, it could be done without a computer, rockets went up without computers, plus people make a great computer. The computers for apollo did pretty straightforward stuff, and were mainly there so the astronauts didn't have to keep doing stuff non-stop. They could still sight stars and calculate there path and manual fire rockets to adjust (like they did in Apollo 13),
The thing is we have all gotten so used to doing stuff with a calculator that we forget you can do it without. When was the last time you did a square root by hand (or even remember how). I think this is the kind of thing that causes people to wonder how things like the pyramids were made, people just can't think of how to do things without modern tools, cause thats all they know. To the Egyptians building them probably wasn't that hard to figure out.
well, you could do it without computers, would just be even harder, plus astronauts would have one sucky time flying the craft by hand to the moon. But it could be done, there is always a way without a computer.
The other thing is they took a very simple approach to thing, to do it today would be even harder because we would over complex thing thing with uber redundancy and sensors for everything and so forth. Thus why we could get to the moon, or russians get space stations, but the space shuttle and space station suck.
Not that getting more computers involved is bad, it just makes it easier for things to crap out and not know why. Mechanical stuff is easy to figure out why it's not working, electrical not so much, and code and semiconductors very hard.
I too look at how we did it, am are amazed it all worked. But then, look at a Model T or a Steam Locomotive, today it seams amazing people would trust those thing cross country or that they would be very durable, but they did it just fine.
I'm pretty sure my powermac has failed on my more then my atari 800 ever did.
This has been around for a while, and I think everyone but the person who submitted this would agree it's hideous. This thing has been getting called ugly for a long time now.
I believe you can get them in the shipped to the US, but it ends up costing you like a 1000 bucks for the case. I've heard of some people placing bulk orders with them to get the price down.
How about an ASIMO riding a toyota walker thing, that is riding a segway.
I'm waiting for the first ASIMO to get on one of those Toyota Walker things from a few weeks ago. Robot riding a robot while killing us all, and with a Hello Kitty theme to the horror.
Well, some people you can't make happy.
But I would be perfectly happy with a nuclear plant or a wind farm near me. I just don't want coal plant, i want them banned.
actualy, birds in the airstream just increases the massflow over the blades and can give the windmill some extra kick, bit like a water wheel :) And birds are a renewable resource.
Wouldn't you love to be an endaged species, especialy be a male of an endanged species, the whole expectation for you would be to mate as much as you possible can, for the good of your kind have as much sex as you possible can.
Anyways, the bird issue gets overblown, and is a pretty minor thing to worry about. Far as being unsightly, well, many (most) find them beautiful, not ugly, it's really up to the person. Cost isn't that bad, I can't say I have ever seen them near a coast, they typicaly end up on ridges of mountains, most of them i have ever seen where in wyoming and Colorado in the middle of no where.
I really like wind, and its one of the best alt. sources we have, but still it can be a basis for the grid, it can be there to be used when avalible, but you still need a constant source. For that we need lots and lots of nuke plants (the best source we have).
I saw an interesting thing one day on tv, They brought Jeff Gordon (nascar driver) and some Formula one driver (can't remember which), to Indy for the road course, they drove there cars around. Then they switched, Gordon got in the F1 car, the F1 guy in Gordons Nextel Cup car. Guess what happened?
In a few laps Gordon was pulling times just as good as the F1 guy was, dang close to the pole time for the track.
The F1 guy, not sure if it was Shoemaker but it was one of the names i knew and i don't follow F1. He was struggling, he just couldn't drive the car.
The reason, simple, F1 is all car, they have made it so easy on the driver it's basicly point and shoot, if you gave a lot of drivers a chance to drive one, they would do great, they just don't get a chance. But Nextel cup cars are designed to be hard to drive, it's about the driver, not the cars (equal cars in theory). Every year there are new rules added making them harder to drive, thus the skills needed go up even more. Sure the drivers don't look all flashy, they are not some thin euro guy trying to look cool, they are just families that have evolved doing that thing, and they really are very good drivers.
People want to diss Nextel cup cars cause they are low tech, on low tech tracks, well thats the whole idea, it's about drivers and stratgy, not shear spending the most money on a super car.
Problem with dictionary.com is it's a very poor dictionary with lots of things that arn't close to words, and a lot of far stretched definitions, it's like a wiki gone bad at times. I use it from time to time, but it's not something I would ever seriously use for a good number of definitions and such.
I think you are looking at this wrong like so many others. They bought IBMs PC devision, that will Lenovo will basicly become IBM PC devision. They will take up the quality IBM has, not bring down IBMs quality.
They did this to gain all the quality. Besides things like thinkpads arn't even designed much by IBM, it's some asian company that makes them for most everyone else.
I expect them to be much like when IBM spun off the printer devision which became lexmark. Lenovo will re-orginize, probably just scrap much of what they had. Probably rename under a new catchy name, and grow to be a big time player. People just don't think IBM when it comes to home computers anymore. They will go after that again which IBM has long since ditched.
I guess thing will now be listed as "Lenovo Compatible"
I have a thinkpad 500, 25mhz 486 i think. Pull it out sometimes, still boots up and runs.
"I think Thinkpad and other IBM gadgets will decrease as much in quality under Lenovo as Volvo has decreased in quality under Ford's"
So quality is going to go massively up, and the computers will become very trendy and liked instead of mocked by the masses? Sales will increase, and people won't think of their products as boxes anymore.
Gee this is horrible.
No, its called people with taste. A retard would go to GAP and pay 50 bucks for a T-shirt witch a giant gab logo all over it, when they could get the same shirt without the GAP logo for 10 bucks at a differant store.
If you haven't noticed, the more highquality a product is, the less logo and badging it has on it. Simply because not slapping your logo all over things is part of quality. People will pay to not be some big tacky billboard for a product. If I'm making a purchase of a large price, i don't care how good something is if it looks like a turd, I'm not buying it. Why do you think apple can sell a monitor with same panel in it as other companies use who sell it for less? Simple, taste, they make it clean looking, and that sells.
Similar effect with cars, ever notice that cheap cars look ugly compaired to expensive cars, but the reality is it cost the same to make a car look beautiful as it does to make one look ugly, all the shape of the parts. And the more expensive ones do their looks with less.
Oh how about computer cases, look at Lian Li cases, they really arn't that great ( I own one, it's pretty sucky). But people will buy them anyways cause it's how you get a clean looking case. All I wanted was a cheap clean small box, but they don't exist, if you go cheap you get a over styled POS. To get a simple box you have to pay more.
This is the reality of the world. And as long as people like you decide to go for saving a few bucks to become a billboard for products, the world will be stuck in a rut of massive marketing in every freaking corner.
No, up until 1980 we had only amounted ~1 trillion dollars in debt (in about 200 years), and much of that was in the decade before, through most the history of the US we ran fairly well balanced budgets.
But then Reagan-nomics came in and jumped our debt up another 3-4 Trillion in 12 years. Between republican tax cuts and massive republican spending the thing fell apart. It did begin to get fixed by the late 90s after years a cutting waste in the gov. and some tax increases we were paying back the debt, then of course we got in our 2nd round of Reagan-nomics (voodoo economics as GHWB would call it).
Its apparently very easy to get people to think republicans are good with money, and that massive debts don't matter. Guess those people like paying ~25 cents on the dollar on their taxes just to pay interest on the debt.
Yeah, most all places have this. I really don't know what's up with this article cause most bigger towns have these systems already, not just trip sensors but ones that adapt based on traffic conditions.
I do wish San Jose would get even trip sensors, this place sucks, you just wait forever, doesn't help they have these idiotic left turn red arrows so you can't go left even when nothing is coming.