It was named Freedom when it was first drawn up to be a US-only station in the 1980's.
It was named Alpha when it first became an international space station in the late 1980's or early 1990's.
Alpha was dropped in NASA literature in the mid 1990's, about when Russia joined, possibly due to the fact that Russia had operated the first space station back in the 1970's.
It became Alpha again after Bill Shepard arrived as the first commander, despite protests from top NASA administration (who probably wanted to name it to score some political points or have some big ceremony). Shepard had probably trained under the Alpha name for a while and decided to stick with it, since it was ok with the rest of his crew (Alpha is also Alpha in Russian).
The article didn't mention about how well the mixed Russian-American crew was getting along. It did seem to stress that the "communication" problems stemmed from a ground crew that wasn't being realistic about fixes for faulty equipment (possibly due to the fact that they may or may not have been paid in the last six months).
It sounds to me like the Alpha astro/cosmonauts are working together pretty well, considering that they are still alive and that there are no hastily-scheduled crew exchanges. If there is a problem, it should be alleviated in a few years when Alpha is capable of housing a larger crew.
The two challengers emerged from a field of 447 submissions as the only ones able to remove the protection systems and successfully disable one of five technologies currently under consideration for SDMI screening technology, the group said.
I know more people probably tried and didn't submit anything, but I'd say there are a lot more than 447 people with the skills and interest to try cracking these schemes. If that is all the submissions they got, I'd say the boycott was a success.
Just think of the possibilities for messages in backgrounds! I can just picture it-a harassment lawsuit dismissed because nobody but the woman defendant can see the message in the company literature denouncing her sex/race/religion! Secret marketing campaigns!
How about the emperor's new clothes, modern style? Someone buys the latest, greatest, 4-color garment, only nobody but the tetra-colors can see that it is only three colors!
I guess a better question is, how long till we see the first law/lawsuite involving 4-color vision?
In the movie Predator, the alien's point of view was shown in a red-only picture, signifying infrared. If someone could see infrared as a fourth color channel, wouldn't they be unable to see it seperately from normal color vision? I can't consciencely only see blue, for example.
On another note, how about seeing ultra-violet? Lots of insects have it. A lot of flowers that appear very dark or black are brilliant in UV.
Save the Earth, do our laundry somewhere else
on
On Asteroid Mining
·
· Score: 3
I think there's a good argument to get the ecologists going for this. Mining and smelting are really nasty polluters. If we do it in space, we get the benefits of having nice stuff without the mess in our back yard here on earth that comes from making the nice stuff. Plus, we don't have to destroy all kinds of natural wonders while prospecting for ore or energy supplies to power the processing plants.
The MIT leg lab is developing algorithms to dynamically control robot walking. The P2, predecessor to the one in the article, had to be pre-programmed in order to walk a course, i.e. it could not react dynamically. If it lost its balance it could not recover. Has anyone seen any info about the walking algorthims and course-plotting capabilities of the P3?
On a side note, I can't wait for the 5th revision; then we can call it ASIMOV!
The website for Constellation 3D states that the cost will be not much more than a CD or DVD. Unfortunately, that is probably the manufacturing price:
The FMD/C technology is presently protected by over 70 Japanese, European, and US patents, approved and/or pending, dozens of priority establishing disclosures, and the exceptional know-how of an unprecedented group of physicists cooperating across the world.
To me, this means over 70 different royalties that consumers will have to pay when purchasing the media and readers. Suppose we'll have to pay higher pre-sale taxes on the readers for the government to distribute to copyright holders (since we can copy so much more copyrighted material)?
If the electoral college disapeared, how would the candidates campaign? Right now, they seem to base their strategies on capturing states with electoral votes.
For a lot of people (myself included) don't have access to DSL, cable modem, etc. If I want to set up a site for my own use with things like high-res photos, family videos, or sharing MP3's, videophone, etc., I don't have an alternative within a reasonable price range. Heck, there are still places in the US (like extreme northern Minnesota) that don't have telephone cables because the phone companies won't install them. They still have to rely on a rickety old radio system!
Unless I can shell out a big fat wad of cash to some hosting service that will put my machine in a locked room I can't get to without their supervision, people like me don't have an option.
I know in that in mammals, the mere act of using skeletal muscles pumps blood. This is one of the ways your heart can keep up during strenuous exercise. Maybe the long necks were constantly undulating to aid in blood flow?
As for multiple hearts, the stegosaurus apparently had a second brain near the base of its tail. Why not some specialized blood pumping organs???
I wouldn't give two much credit to one paper or a small sample of fossils. For years, paleantologists (sp?) thought the duck-billed dinosaurs had a horn. It was actually a thumb-type appendage that was found in a jumbled fossil and placed in the wrong spot by its finder. Someone finally figured it out when they kept finding more horns than dinosaurs.
Are there any activities which will be prohibited on the StarBand service?
In consideration for all StarBand Internet users, StarBand reserves the right to limit "bandwidth hog" activities such as audio and video streaming, and automatic file exchange applications (file-sharing). See the Terms of Use of the service for more information on restricted activities.
I don't know about you, but I read that as a license to stop FTP, Napster, Web serving, Gnutella, FreeNet, etc. etc. etc...
So much for setting up a web site via that route.:(
Anybody heard of the "Industrial Revolution"? It started in Great Britain. Great Britain took legal measures to protect the industrial secrets of its factory owners.
Several American entrapenours hired spies to figure out how the British factories worked even though it was illegal. The end result was "The United States of America, Industrial Giant".
Does anyone else find it ironic that the economic heirs of those enterprising individuals are buying laws to protect their own IP 200 years later?
What are we supposed to do? Move to China, where they don't honor the same IP laws? Hmm...makes you wonder what the next "great" nation will be.
Keep a couple of networked floppy drives in PC's that people have access to. If it's enough of a hassle, it will encourage people to use network shares or other types of media. And by leaving just a couple, people that really don't have an alternative will still be able to transfer stuff to their home PC.
Maybe they'll finally get that space tether working and we won't see this headline every-other week (alternating of course with "Mir to be de-orbited). Until then, I guess we get to keep watching investors see their investments go up in the exhaust plumes of fuel-laden supply drones.
I look at P2P as having a ripple effect. Like a ripple in a puddle, each of the water molecules only has an effect on the molecules near to it. It has very little direct influence on molecules far away. However, the laws governing propogation transfer the effect through all the interveining molecules and do effect further molecules.
Okay, enough of the analogy! The point is that long distance bandwidth (influence) is limited. However, short distance bandwidth to a limited number of peers is not a limiting factor. So, peers only need to look in their local "neigborhood". Since each "peer" has a slightly different "neighborhood",
drum roll pleese....
the information on the P2P network will propogate reguardless of bandwith restrictions on long-range connections.
Obvious to anyone that understands how news servers work, but aparently not CNN.
A lot of people seem to think that if it becomes law, it will be unenforceable-that too many people do it to have an impact.
How many people in the US are in prison for drug offenses? A person could argue that there are too many users to make a dent, but there are still millions in prison for non-violent, private "crimes".
The DMCA was bad, and it got passed. Having INTERPOL and the US law enforcement community asking for something like this scares the s___ out of me.
There are no reviews for Excel, Word or Office on the Wine apps page in the 4 or 5 range. Is this because it isn't at that level yet, or because users aren't remembering that wine was intended to be bug-for-bug compatible?
A lot of hospitals use some version of a MS GUI in their nursing stations to run administrative programs, etc. To my knowlege, you couldn't really call any the Windows versions failsafe.
I do remember seeing an HP machine running the baby monitor for my wife when she was having premature labor. That was really comforting (to me anyway), knowing that the BSOD was not going to show up in such a stressful situation.
Is Linux the right OS? I think it is for administrative programs. Health care costs are rising fast and hospitals are hard-pressed to keep rates reasonable.
For monitors, I think it can be a good choice if a company is willing to set up a distro. There are big companies out there like IBM, Intel, and RH that are supporting it. Besides, it's much easier to bug-proof an embedded system then a PC with many unknowns.
How about adding some 3rd party candidates to Congress? If nobody has a majority in the House or Senate, then we have people that make a difference in a position that does not answer to a party whip espousing special interests. Laws that make sense will have a better chance of passing and stupid laws actually face more obstruction.
I come from Minnesota too, and Jesse's got my vote the next time around. I don't agree with a lot of his ideas, but he does a great job of keeping the two big parties in check!
Slashdot Mirror
It looks pretty interesting. Have you thought about posting as a seperate story?
Questions, questions, questions...
It was named Alpha when it first became an international space station in the late 1980's or early 1990's.
Alpha was dropped in NASA literature in the mid 1990's, about when Russia joined, possibly due to the fact that Russia had operated the first space station back in the 1970's.
It became Alpha again after Bill Shepard arrived as the first commander, despite protests from top NASA administration (who probably wanted to name it to score some political points or have some big ceremony). Shepard had probably trained under the Alpha name for a while and decided to stick with it, since it was ok with the rest of his crew (Alpha is also Alpha in Russian).
It sounds to me like the Alpha astro/cosmonauts are working together pretty well, considering that they are still alive and that there are no hastily-scheduled crew exchanges. If there is a problem, it should be alleviated in a few years when Alpha is capable of housing a larger crew.
I know more people probably tried and didn't submit anything, but I'd say there are a lot more than 447 people with the skills and interest to try cracking these schemes. If that is all the submissions they got, I'd say the boycott was a success.
How about the emperor's new clothes, modern style? Someone buys the latest, greatest, 4-color garment, only nobody but the tetra-colors can see that it is only three colors!
I guess a better question is, how long till we see the first law/lawsuite involving 4-color vision?
On another note, how about seeing ultra-violet? Lots of insects have it. A lot of flowers that appear very dark or black are brilliant in UV.
I think there's a good argument to get the ecologists going for this. Mining and smelting are really nasty polluters. If we do it in space, we get the benefits of having nice stuff without the mess in our back yard here on earth that comes from making the nice stuff. Plus, we don't have to destroy all kinds of natural wonders while prospecting for ore or energy supplies to power the processing plants.
On a side note, I can't wait for the 5th revision; then we can call it ASIMOV!
We should have seen this coming. Afterall, it is just a variation of control tactics used by the other evil empire.;)
The FMD/C technology is presently protected by over 70 Japanese, European, and US patents, approved and/or pending, dozens of priority establishing disclosures, and the exceptional know-how of an unprecedented group of physicists cooperating across the world.
To me, this means over 70 different royalties that consumers will have to pay when purchasing the media and readers. Suppose we'll have to pay higher pre-sale taxes on the readers for the government to distribute to copyright holders (since we can copy so much more copyrighted material)?
Unless I can shell out a big fat wad of cash to some hosting service that will put my machine in a locked room I can't get to without their supervision, people like me don't have an option.
As for multiple hearts, the stegosaurus apparently had a second brain near the base of its tail. Why not some specialized blood pumping organs???
I wouldn't give two much credit to one paper or a small sample of fossils. For years, paleantologists (sp?) thought the duck-billed dinosaurs had a horn. It was actually a thumb-type appendage that was found in a jumbled fossil and placed in the wrong spot by its finder. Someone finally figured it out when they kept finding more horns than dinosaurs.
Are there any activities which will be prohibited on the StarBand service? In consideration for all StarBand Internet users, StarBand reserves the right to limit "bandwidth hog" activities such as audio and video streaming, and automatic file exchange applications (file-sharing). See the Terms of Use of the service for more information on restricted activities.
I don't know about you, but I read that as a license to stop FTP, Napster, Web serving, Gnutella, FreeNet, etc. etc. etc...
So much for setting up a web site via that route. :(
I guess they're out-they gave money to Gore.
It's because they say they are experts. The pointy-haired ones always believe "experts", unless the expert is from their own company.
Several American entrapenours hired spies to figure out how the British factories worked even though it was illegal. The end result was "The United States of America, Industrial Giant".
Does anyone else find it ironic that the economic heirs of those enterprising individuals are buying laws to protect their own IP 200 years later?
What are we supposed to do? Move to China, where they don't honor the same IP laws? Hmm...makes you wonder what the next "great" nation will be.
Keep a couple of networked floppy drives in PC's that people have access to. If it's enough of a hassle, it will encourage people to use network shares or other types of media. And by leaving just a couple, people that really don't have an alternative will still be able to transfer stuff to their home PC.
Okay, enough of the analogy! The point is that long distance bandwidth (influence) is limited. However, short distance bandwidth to a limited number of peers is not a limiting factor. So, peers only need to look in their local "neigborhood". Since each "peer" has a slightly different "neighborhood",
drum roll pleese....
the information on the P2P network will propogate reguardless of bandwith restrictions on long-range connections.
Obvious to anyone that understands how news servers work, but aparently not CNN.
How many people in the US are in prison for drug offenses? A person could argue that there are too many users to make a dent, but there are still millions in prison for non-violent, private "crimes".
The DMCA was bad, and it got passed. Having INTERPOL and the US law enforcement community asking for something like this scares the s___ out of me.
I do remember seeing an HP machine running the baby monitor for my wife when she was having premature labor. That was really comforting (to me anyway), knowing that the BSOD was not going to show up in such a stressful situation.
Is Linux the right OS? I think it is for administrative programs. Health care costs are rising fast and hospitals are hard-pressed to keep rates reasonable.
For monitors, I think it can be a good choice if a company is willing to set up a distro. There are big companies out there like IBM, Intel, and RH that are supporting it. Besides, it's much easier to bug-proof an embedded system then a PC with many unknowns.
So do we all need a private domain to rip on ourselves? ;)
I come from Minnesota too, and Jesse's got my vote the next time around. I don't agree with a lot of his ideas, but he does a great job of keeping the two big parties in check!