Sure, the dead have no more use for a face than a liver. If you want my face, your desperation would no doubt elicit my sympathy (except that I'd be preoccupied with the whole being dead business).
At some point they stopped sending them and that was when I told them, "No, you can't have my name and address." Didn't seem to phase the clerks any.
My experience has been worse - I get dirty looks or some rubbish about why they want my phone number. Other places are cooler about it. Babies 'R Us (in Maryland), always asks for your phone, and I always state: We don't give out our phone number..., and the clerk just enters (999)999-9999. They're pretty blase in there, but I got the impression that the Radio Shack guys were getting paid by the address.
Anyway, who needs Radio Shack? They;ve alienated their core customers in a futile atempt to compete with the Circuit Cities of the world. If you want a little cruel fun, go in there and ask them where they keep the 100 microFarad capacitors.
OTOH, I have a hard time believing that an organism that optimized its genome for surviving direct exposure to UV radiation would be much good at surviving in our bodies. I don't even know that there is a path through gene space to get there. Only speculation, of course - IANAMB ( I am not a microbiologist).
It seems an easier strategy would be to hide. You wouldn't need to be very far down inside a meteorite or chunk of space debris to escape UV.
Somewhere in my VHS archives I have this unfinished episode (Shada) with Tom Baker both starring and hosting (in a ridiculous pinstripe suit) and filling in the story line for the missing scenes. I can't remember where I found it.
Yes, a mess. A very good, insightful article, but so painful to read. The tail is wagging the dog all over the place at NASA right now. The main problems as I see them are the palpable presence of the grevious absence of vision and courage, great lumbering dinosaurs consuming nearly all the budget, and the numerous little piggies who scramble to feed at the trough very time a new budget line item opens up.
I just reported bug number 178447. Of the bugs I report, I would suppose about a third turn out to be duplicates or pilot error. However, it's rare that I file an enhancement - I just wnat the promised features to work right.
I have several objections to this, but first and easiest is; why would anyone want a machine to be as stupid as a human? When we're talking about thinking machines, I daresay we're talking about machines that work far better than we do.
Actually, as any undergrad text will tell you, L1 is not stable even in the circular restricted three-body problem. Only L4 and L5 are passively stable. However, it is possible to stationkeep about L1 for a fairly long time without much penalty. There are at least a couple of spacecraft doing this about the Earth-Sun L1 point, which is much vcloser to the Earth than the Sun.
SETI @ Home has a couple of weaknesses. They are mindful of these, but you can only do so much:
They would probably only detect a signal from someone who was trying to communicate with us. If you believe that the speed of light is a true macroscopic speed limit for information, than thatlimits us to a sphere about 50 LY in radius, but which gets bigger every day.
They can't see the whole celestial sphere from Arecibo - only part of it, and only a small part of it at anyone time. Soon they'll be able to see more, but not all.
What embedding Mozilla promises to me is the ability display and interact with appropriately transformed HTML and XML documents in any kind of application without having to reinvent all the complex machinery to do that. XML apps like MathML and SVG are particularly important to me, but who wants to write the code to display them? Now lots of things are possible that have little to do with browsers. I like it.
Quite often, coincidence is the only explanation you need. We just tend to notice coincidences and dismiss the randomness - our brains are well adapted to do that. Spotting correlations is critical to survival. Coincident data points are necessary, but not sufficient for corelation.
In the current environment, it would have to be cheap to get funded. Arbitrarily large is arbirarily expensive.
Of course, if the microbes aren't fairly high up in the atmosphere, then my idea doesn't work. It seems to me that in-situ analysis with some sort of balloon is the only hope. However, this would be complex and costly. It's non-trivial to sample the upper atmosphere of our own planet.
Insert a probe into the atmosphere (either from the orbiter or as a separate vehicle). This probe could use one or more of several techniques (parachute, winged design (no retro-thrusters at this stage as this may contaminate the samples)) to perform a fairly slow and controlled descent.
I don't see that a slow descent is necessary or even possible. Any way you do it, your velocity with respect to the atmosphere is on the order of kilometers per second.
The easy way to do it is to enter Venus orbit in a high elliptical orbit with periapsis close to the atmosphere. First, make a few close passes with optical, UV instruments and a mass spectrometer to try and get some idea of where to lower. Natural rotation of the line of apsides will allow you to look at different latitides.
When you're ready to go in, a small delta-V will bump either a probe or the whole spacecraft down into the atmosphere, where you take your samples - either using some kind of gas capture technique, or Aerogel like the Stardust mission. You could also run your mass spectrometer at the same time. You'd need a heat shield, of course.
If you have to have low velocity capture, best thing is to brake in the atmosphere, pop up to the top with a balloon, then do in-situ analysis. Returning anything you captured low-velocity would take too much velocity capability.
I'll read it, but with no hope of a neat ending of a neat anything, for that matter. We know that DNA labored on SoD for years before setting it aside, so while it unlikely to be entirely satisfactory (neither was Mostly Harmless, IMO), it should be fun for those who followed Adams' work and career and admire the Hitchiker Series.
The posting implies that NASA is leading these studies. Not at all. It's primarily the academic community and non-profits like the Space Studies Institute and the National Space Society. NASA generally puts its mouth where its money is, and that's the ISS, which does little or nothing to help advance the cause of space development.
Given the very poor ROI of the ISS, who would seriously trust NASA to lead the way on lunar, asteroid and cometary resource exploitation? The best they can do is sponsor science missions so that we can understand what these resources are and where. In fact, they are doing that.
Like any conference, there will be loads of good and not so good ideas presented, but the fundamental logic is the same: it makes no sense to build things in space with materials brought from the ground. There are loads of materials on the moon (and no biosphere to damage) that have the potential to supply a large proportion of a spacefaring civilization. Big question is, do we want to be a spacefaring civilization?
You have to do all four. They're all necessary conditions for success. And yes, that makes it hard. What makes it impossible is when you have no compelling mission.
Im my view, a fundamental error of ISS is the effort to justify it in terms of science. This has led to all sort of distortions. The real reason for doing is to further space developement. The problem is that there is no meaningful strategic plan for this into which ISS fits.
The real reason for keeping ISS flying these days is the huge dislocation and job loss it would cause if it was canceled. Without a real plan for space development, this will continue to be the case.
One solution is to radically repurpose the ISS and evolve its design accordingly. A simpler solution would be to cancel it, but then what do you do with all those people whose value-added was dubious to begin with, and would then be not even illusory? Not so simple for a political beast like NASA.
I know clever and talented web designers for whom "standards compliance" is at best a vague abstraction. They hardly ever visit the W3C site, and probably never run their pages through the validator (it hurts). There's a kind of pisoner's dilemma at work here: why should I be the first one to comply, when no one else is, not even the big guys?
The solution is the same as it is for lots of things - get to them when they're young, and help them understand and value openness and robustness. The key to making openness work is a strong community-developed standards process, which only works if you comply.
3. XP is for eXPloit
Knowing the care microsoft gives to security, this meaning is close to become reality.
4. XP is for eXPlosion
eXPlosion of Denial of Service (DoS) attacks as windows XP gives raw socket acces to the mass of home users. (read http://grc.com/dos/winxp.htm and http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/19332.html)
Our CIO just sent out an e-mail saying don't install XP. They're still looking at security issues, and may be for some while. Given MS's record of not really designing for security, I hope they take a very long look.
Just wait, it's just the begining. They might work in a heterogenous environment and need something from Microsoft. They might not be total zealots. The list goes on. Hotmail and MSDN will soon follow.
Well, you can download anything you need from microsoft.com, no?
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, the dead have no more use for a face than a liver. If you want my face, your desperation would no doubt elicit my sympathy (except that I'd be preoccupied with the whole being dead business).
My experience has been worse - I get dirty looks or some rubbish about why they want my phone number. Other places are cooler about it. Babies 'R Us (in Maryland), always asks for your phone, and I always state: We don't give out our phone number..., and the clerk just enters (999)999-9999. They're pretty blase in there, but I got the impression that the Radio Shack guys were getting paid by the address.
Anyway, who needs Radio Shack? They;ve alienated their core customers in a futile atempt to compete with the Circuit Cities of the world. If you want a little cruel fun, go in there and ask them where they keep the 100 microFarad capacitors.
OTOH, I have a hard time believing that an organism that optimized its genome for surviving direct exposure to UV radiation would be much good at surviving in our bodies. I don't even know that there is a path through gene space to get there. Only speculation, of course - IANAMB ( I am not a microbiologist).
It seems an easier strategy would be to hide. You wouldn't need to be very far down inside a meteorite or chunk of space debris to escape UV.
Somewhere in my VHS archives I have this unfinished episode (Shada) with Tom Baker both starring and hosting (in a ridiculous pinstripe suit) and filling in the story line for the missing scenes. I can't remember where I found it.
Is Tom Baker still with us?
Yes, a mess. A very good, insightful article, but so painful to read. The tail is wagging the dog all over the place at NASA right now. The main problems as I see them are the palpable presence of the grevious absence of vision and courage, great lumbering dinosaurs consuming nearly all the budget, and the numerous little piggies who scramble to feed at the trough very time a new budget line item opens up.
Albatross!
I just reported bug number 178447. Of the bugs I report, I would suppose about a third turn out to be duplicates or pilot error. However, it's rare that I file an enhancement - I just wnat the promised features to work right.
I have several objections to this, but first and easiest is; why would anyone want a machine to be as stupid as a human? When we're talking about thinking machines, I daresay we're talking about machines that work far better than we do.
It's not distant at all - in the same solar system, roughly a light-hour away. How close do you need it?
Actually, as any undergrad text will tell you, L1 is not stable even in the circular restricted three-body problem. Only L4 and L5 are passively stable. However, it is possible to stationkeep about L1 for a fairly long time without much penalty. There are at least a couple of spacecraft doing this about the Earth-Sun L1 point, which is much vcloser to the Earth than the Sun.
SETI @ Home has a couple of weaknesses. They are mindful of these, but you can only do so much:
What embedding Mozilla promises to me is the ability display and interact with appropriately transformed HTML and XML documents in any kind of application without having to reinvent all the complex machinery to do that. XML apps like MathML and SVG are particularly important to me, but who wants to write the code to display them? Now lots of things are possible that have little to do with browsers. I like it.
Maybe this IS the reservation? Or the Asylum?
Quite often, coincidence is the only explanation you need. We just tend to notice coincidences and dismiss the randomness - our brains are well adapted to do that. Spotting correlations is critical to survival. Coincident data points are necessary, but not sufficient for corelation.
In the current environment, it would have to be cheap to get funded. Arbitrarily large is arbirarily expensive.
Of course, if the microbes aren't fairly high up in the atmosphere, then my idea doesn't work. It seems to me that in-situ analysis with some sort of balloon is the only hope. However, this would be complex and costly. It's non-trivial to sample the upper atmosphere of our own planet.
I don't see that a slow descent is necessary or even possible. Any way you do it, your velocity with respect to the atmosphere is on the order of kilometers per second.
The easy way to do it is to enter Venus orbit in a high elliptical orbit with periapsis close to the atmosphere. First, make a few close passes with optical, UV instruments and a mass spectrometer to try and get some idea of where to lower. Natural rotation of the line of apsides will allow you to look at different latitides.
When you're ready to go in, a small delta-V will bump either a probe or the whole spacecraft down into the atmosphere, where you take your samples - either using some kind of gas capture technique, or Aerogel like the Stardust mission. You could also run your mass spectrometer at the same time. You'd need a heat shield, of course.
If you have to have low velocity capture, best thing is to brake in the atmosphere, pop up to the top with a balloon, then do in-situ analysis. Returning anything you captured low-velocity would take too much velocity capability.
Except that 14 $/month x 12 months/year = 168 $/year. Sounds like you'd be better off with Apple.
Apple has every right to charge for a service hey provide. They are, however, not an ISP, so about $8.50 a month sounds a bit steep to me.
That said, I'm not sure that this is official. Usually, Apple doesn't announce things like this until after the keynote.
But they actually are selling abstinence shorts. If you were a hoaxer, would YOU sell abstinence shorts?
I'll read it, but with no hope of a neat ending of a neat anything, for that matter. We know that DNA labored on SoD for years before setting it aside, so while it unlikely to be entirely satisfactory (neither was Mostly Harmless, IMO), it should be fun for those who followed Adams' work and career and admire the Hitchiker Series.
The posting implies that NASA is leading these studies. Not at all. It's primarily the academic community and non-profits like the Space Studies Institute and the National Space Society. NASA generally puts its mouth where its money is, and that's the ISS, which does little or nothing to help advance the cause of space development.
Given the very poor ROI of the ISS, who would seriously trust NASA to lead the way on lunar, asteroid and cometary resource exploitation? The best they can do is sponsor science missions so that we can understand what these resources are and where. In fact, they are doing that.
Like any conference, there will be loads of good and not so good ideas presented, but the fundamental logic is the same: it makes no sense to build things in space with materials brought from the ground. There are loads of materials on the moon (and no biosphere to damage) that have the potential to supply a large proportion of a spacefaring civilization. Big question is, do we want to be a spacefaring civilization?
You have to do all four. They're all necessary conditions for success. And yes, that makes it hard. What makes it impossible is when you have no compelling mission.
Im my view, a fundamental error of ISS is the effort to justify it in terms of science. This has led to all sort of distortions. The real reason for doing is to further space developement. The problem is that there is no meaningful strategic plan for this into which ISS fits.
The real reason for keeping ISS flying these days is the huge dislocation and job loss it would cause if it was canceled. Without a real plan for space development, this will continue to be the case.
One solution is to radically repurpose the ISS and evolve its design accordingly. A simpler solution would be to cancel it, but then what do you do with all those people whose value-added was dubious to begin with, and would then be not even illusory? Not so simple for a political beast like NASA.
My guess is that it would take a couple of days, non stop. And $400 worth of CDs hardly qualifies as a collection.
I know clever and talented web designers for whom "standards compliance" is at best a vague abstraction. They hardly ever visit the W3C site, and probably never run their pages through the validator (it hurts). There's a kind of pisoner's dilemma at work here: why should I be the first one to comply, when no one else is, not even the big guys?
The solution is the same as it is for lots of things - get to them when they're young, and help them understand and value openness and robustness. The key to making openness work is a strong community-developed standards process, which only works if you comply.
This is going to take at least a generation.
"Nothing" isn't exactly accurate. Darwin is open source, and Apple has ported OpenGL, which works quite nicely.
It would be very cool of Apple to open Quartz as well, but I'm not sure they legally can.
Our CIO just sent out an e-mail saying don't install XP. They're still looking at security issues, and may be for some while. Given MS's record of not really designing for security, I hope they take a very long look.
OTOH, no one told me I couldn't install OS X.
Well, you can download anything you need from microsoft.com, no?