Are you trying to make money or reduce the amount of free support you give out?
Just the act of asking for money will make a lot of people run for the hills. These are the same folk who think it's ok to bug their doctor if they see her at a restaurant.
If your just trying to reduce the amount of support you have to give out, do what I do: never touch the machine. Ask questions, get all sorts of details,, sympathisize completely, then tell the person exactly what they need to do to solve the problem. This way the onus is completely on them. They have to do the work. They have to assume responsibility for buggering things up. When it comes down to it, most people will do nothing to the machine but they will search for the next sucker to give them free support.
Or you could always use the same excuse I use to get out of long meetings: fein a bladder infection.
Note that in my original post I didn't say YAY for the US. It sickens me to know the US got men on the moon and then got psyched about Clementine 30 years later. Again: WHO CARES!!!
The science may be good but I don't see it moving us as a species forward in the kind of leaps and bounds that build on themselves. The kind of leaps and bounds that make the people witht he money want to continue.
We could stop sending probes and the general public wouldn't give a damn. Put people on the moon and Mars and no one is going to say "It's getting too expensive, lets just stop sending them supplies."
While it would be feasible to rescue the people off of the shuttle, what about rescuing the shuttle itself?
If the shuttle is abandoned in orbit you can bet it will be in a 120-160 mile LEO. Given the apsect ratio of the craft and the height of the orbit, you can bet the craft wouldn't stay up long. That means that NASA would have three choices: 1) boost the craft to a higher more stable orbit until something can be done, 2) perform a fix and try to land the craft unmanned, 3) de-orbit quickly so the craft wreckage lands where they expect.
1) Unless they plan to have Atlantis permanently tasked as the rescue ship, there is no way this can be done. The booster would have to already be in the cargo bay and good to go. You would prefer to not have to tell the folk in the VAB they've got 1 week plus to take out what ever payload is in the bay and replace it with the booster.
2) This one might actually be feasible. If you assume that the craft is already lost then you can try your fix and bring it down unmanned. If I remember correctly, NASA has already done some tests on completely autonomous landings. Aiming for Edwards AFB gives you lots of room to land and plenty of open area for wreckage if things don't work.
3) Unfortunately we know that NASA/JPL are all to willing to bring down currently functional spacecraft in the name of a known wreckage footprint. The main issue with this would be how long they can wait. How long could the shuttle stay on orbit unmanned and still be able to perform a realtively stable de-orbit? I'm guessing not long.
Now consider this scenario: There is an impact on the leading edge of the wing. The tiles are damaged but they don't appear to be pierced. It's a good bet the craft could be brought down safely. Will NASA have the will to take the chance of losing the crew?
While this is a great advancement for the Indians I just can't get excited. Been there, done that. Landers, orbiters, impacters... Who cares!!! We had PEOPLE on the moon 35 years ago!
One of the Voyagers is about 8.5 billion miles from Earth and they only use a 20 watt transmitter. That puts them in the 425,000,000 mile per watt range.
But you missed an important point. With all that money being moved around, the balance sheets of many companies inflated mightily. That made the stock market jump.
Why else do you think the bubble burst in April 2000? All the buying that had was ongoing pre-Y2K suddenly dried up in Q1 '00. It's just unfortunate that people misunderstood what was happening for being some part of a BS "new economy".
Also...
No money was pumped "in" to the US economy. Money was merely moved from one use to another.
I always love the "wouldn't it getting boring" argument. I believe it is completely untrue. I think the limitied amount of memory that each of us has in our skulls will take care of the whole boredom aspect.
Consider this simple test: What was the name of your favorite teacher in grade school? What did you have for lunch two weeks ago?
Items that have a large impact on your life stay in long term memory. Minor things fade quickly. Since the amount of memory we can actually hold is finite that means the gaps will just larger. (Whoa, what happened to the eighties, dude)
As for boredom itself, I can get bored in 10 minutes. How will an extra 900 years change that?
Let's face it, the general population can't deal with one dimension, forget three.
These things would be good for a select group of professionals: police, fire, and ambulance. Think of the good that can happen if these vehicles are immune to ground based traffic jams.
Way back, around the begining of the show, I recall hearing talk of having Kirk's grandfather show up. The idea was that supposedly Kirk Sr. was the inventor of the photon torpedo. Perhaps they are contemplating having Shatner in to play that role.
Now the question is to determine if my memory is faulty.We'll see.
I think you've hit on something here. I read this and realized that the only reason I wanted to see Enterpoop canceled, was so that B&B would be given the shaft. I _do_ like the show and I do watch it. This solves my personal quandry. Thanks!
Oh great... So he wants us to run off to Mars, plant our flag, say "yay", come back, kill the program, and go back to underfunded hell like LEO. Gee... Just like we did with the moon.
Uh, could you have Spirit or Opportunity wipe the dust off the solar collectors please? Oh, I'm sorry... Did we not think of that?
That's what robots can't do. They can't adapt the way we can. If anything ever goes wrong that we didn't think about, the robot is screwed.
Let's not forget that just a couple pounds of pressure could have opened Galileo's high-gain antenna and we would have gotten an amazing amount more information than we did.
The plain and simple is that, with the removal fot he Scouring, Jackson didn't "get it".
If you watch the extended version he goes on and on about how much JRR hated war. That much is true. What Jackson completely missed was that JRR also hated industrialization. In particular he hated the fact that industrialization can cause as much destruction to a countryside as war.
I read this and I have a question... How can they be using Arecibo to detect into the bottoms of those craters? Given Arecibo's location (18.3) and Luna's orbital inclination (5 degrees) and the fact that they are looking at Luna's poles then the angle of incedence would be pretty low (4.13 degrees) for the south pole. From the article it sounds like they are only checking the sides of the craters and not the bottom. Not sure what good that does.
Also, so what if it takes a lot of processing to get the water out of the soil. It's not like you don't have a great source of energy just over the crater wall.
The only true way to filter your own spam is to come up with a solution then keep it to yourself.
Think about it... When ever a new filtering technique becomes public it also falls into the hands of the spammers. This means that they can then begin to search for a way around it. With every new "solution" that is a published spammers find a way around it. By constantly trying to stop them _publicly_ all you are doing is making them stronger. Think antibiotics folks.
Believe me when I say that the anti-spam folk are too soft on these vermin. It should be legal to kill them but then all the spam would turn into targetted joe-jobs.
There are only two solutions to this problem: 1) create a private solution, 2) create a mailing system that costs money. (BTW, 2 has the other nice side-effect of stopping all the morons who keep forwarding jokes. Hell, think how well it would punish Outlook virus propogators!)
You missed another one: The Blue Flu. Continue to work 40, 50, or whatever you want.
If the job gets done, great! You're a hero and you're not stressed about it.
If you fail, they won't be asking you do this again soon AND you're not stressed about it. The odds of being let go on the spot are so low that they won't happen. And if it does, you can still collect.
Make sure and remind them constantly that the task is near impossible. This ups the hero or visionary quotient.
While you're right about all the things that are difficult to hide, you (and apparently everyone else) have missed one of the other neat aspects. Filtering of the "ham" quickly becomes a inadvertant whitelist.
The other problem was that the code to prevent the worm from being sent back to the previous machine was either broken or just not there. So it wasn't just a problem with the speed, it was also a problem with an exponential increase in the number of messages at each node.
Re:In the Boston Science museum
on
Water Computing
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· Score: 2
I think they are afraid any actual usage will break the thing.
If this is the thing I saw some time ago, and it appears to be, then the reason it is not used is very cool... It doesn't work anymore!
You may ask, "How is that cool?" Well, it turns out that the through time the tension on the rubber bands changed and some of the wood warped subtly. The machine started to give incorrect answers. I guess that is the pre-computer equivalent of letting the magic smoke out.
So... You've never needed a map that you didn't have? You've never said, "I'll have to Google that when I get home"? You've never had to look up a phone number?
Can't you wait the 15 minutes until you get home? You've never travelled further than fifteen minutes from home?
You've never travelled anywhere without a laptop? If you travel everywhere with your cell phone, laptop, and cables hanging all over the place... I don't believe you should be lecturing people about not having lives.
The best explanation I've ever heard of if a two body system is a planet-moon or two-planet combination is this:
If the center of gravity of two bodies lies inside one of the bodies then that is the planet and the other is the moon. If the center of gravity is between the two objects then it is a two planet system.
One has to wonder if something like this can be taken from the PC to the embedded space in general. I'm sure Wind River (the owners of BSDi) would be annoyed by something like that.
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Just the act of asking for money will make a lot of people run for the hills. These are the same folk who think it's ok to bug their doctor if they see her at a restaurant.
If your just trying to reduce the amount of support you have to give out, do what I do: never touch the machine. Ask questions, get all sorts of details,, sympathisize completely, then tell the person exactly what they need to do to solve the problem. This way the onus is completely on them. They have to do the work. They have to assume responsibility for buggering things up. When it comes down to it, most people will do nothing to the machine but they will search for the next sucker to give them free support.
Or you could always use the same excuse I use to get out of long meetings: fein a bladder infection.
Note that in my original post I didn't say YAY for the US. It sickens me to know the US got men on the moon and then got psyched about Clementine 30 years later. Again: WHO CARES!!!
The science may be good but I don't see it moving us as a species forward in the kind of leaps and bounds that build on themselves. The kind of leaps and bounds that make the people witht he money want to continue.
We could stop sending probes and the general public wouldn't give a damn. Put people on the moon and Mars and no one is going to say "It's getting too expensive, lets just stop sending them supplies."
If the shuttle is abandoned in orbit you can bet it will be in a 120-160 mile LEO. Given the apsect ratio of the craft and the height of the orbit, you can bet the craft wouldn't stay up long. That means that NASA would have three choices: 1) boost the craft to a higher more stable orbit until something can be done, 2) perform a fix and try to land the craft unmanned, 3) de-orbit quickly so the craft wreckage lands where they expect.
1) Unless they plan to have Atlantis permanently tasked as the rescue ship, there is no way this can be done. The booster would have to already be in the cargo bay and good to go. You would prefer to not have to tell the folk in the VAB they've got 1 week plus to take out what ever payload is in the bay and replace it with the booster.
2) This one might actually be feasible. If you assume that the craft is already lost then you can try your fix and bring it down unmanned. If I remember correctly, NASA has already done some tests on completely autonomous landings. Aiming for Edwards AFB gives you lots of room to land and plenty of open area for wreckage if things don't work.
3) Unfortunately we know that NASA/JPL are all to willing to bring down currently functional spacecraft in the name of a known wreckage footprint. The main issue with this would be how long they can wait. How long could the shuttle stay on orbit unmanned and still be able to perform a realtively stable de-orbit? I'm guessing not long.
Now consider this scenario: There is an impact on the leading edge of the wing. The tiles are damaged but they don't appear to be pierced. It's a good bet the craft could be brought down safely. Will NASA have the will to take the chance of losing the crew?
While this is a great advancement for the Indians I just can't get excited. Been there, done that. Landers, orbiters, impacters... Who cares!!! We had PEOPLE on the moon 35 years ago!
One of the Voyagers is about 8.5 billion miles from Earth and they only use a 20 watt transmitter. That puts them in the 425,000,000 mile per watt range.
Why else do you think the bubble burst in April 2000? All the buying that had was ongoing pre-Y2K suddenly dried up in Q1 '00. It's just unfortunate that people misunderstood what was happening for being some part of a BS "new economy".
Also...
No money was pumped "in" to the US economy. Money was merely moved from one use to another.
What do you think an economy is?
Consider this simple test: What was the name of your favorite teacher in grade school? What did you have for lunch two weeks ago?
Items that have a large impact on your life stay in long term memory. Minor things fade quickly. Since the amount of memory we can actually hold is finite that means the gaps will just larger. (Whoa, what happened to the eighties, dude)
As for boredom itself, I can get bored in 10 minutes. How will an extra 900 years change that?
These things would be good for a select group of professionals: police, fire, and ambulance. Think of the good that can happen if these vehicles are immune to ground based traffic jams.
For the public end of things, how about buses?
Think about it... How much better off would this country be if none of the politicians could get to DC?
Now the question is to determine if my memory is faulty.We'll see.
I think you've hit on something here. I read this and realized that the only reason I wanted to see Enterpoop canceled, was so that B&B would be given the shaft. I _do_ like the show and I do watch it. This solves my personal quandry. Thanks!
Oh great... So he wants us to run off to Mars, plant our flag, say "yay", come back, kill the program, and go back to underfunded hell like LEO. Gee... Just like we did with the moon.
That's what robots can't do. They can't adapt the way we can. If anything ever goes wrong that we didn't think about, the robot is screwed.
Let's not forget that just a couple pounds of pressure could have opened Galileo's high-gain antenna and we would have gotten an amazing amount more information than we did.
If you watch the extended version he goes on and on about how much JRR hated war. That much is true. What Jackson completely missed was that JRR also hated industrialization. In particular he hated the fact that industrialization can cause as much destruction to a countryside as war.
Also, so what if it takes a lot of processing to get the water out of the soil. It's not like you don't have a great source of energy just over the crater wall.
Think about it... When ever a new filtering technique becomes public it also falls into the hands of the spammers. This means that they can then begin to search for a way around it. With every new "solution" that is a published spammers find a way around it. By constantly trying to stop them _publicly_ all you are doing is making them stronger. Think antibiotics folks.
Believe me when I say that the anti-spam folk are too soft on these vermin. It should be legal to kill them but then all the spam would turn into targetted joe-jobs.
There are only two solutions to this problem: 1) create a private solution, 2) create a mailing system that costs money. (BTW, 2 has the other nice side-effect of stopping all the morons who keep forwarding jokes. Hell, think how well it would punish Outlook virus propogators!)
If the job gets done, great! You're a hero and you're not stressed about it.
If you fail, they won't be asking you do this again soon AND you're not stressed about it. The odds of being let go on the spot are so low that they won't happen. And if it does, you can still collect.
Make sure and remind them constantly that the task is near impossible. This ups the hero or visionary quotient.
And Lindows is so much closer to the name of the MS product?
I don't know about you but I have never seen a Lindow before.
While you're right about all the things that are difficult to hide, you (and apparently everyone else) have missed one of the other neat aspects. Filtering of the "ham" quickly becomes a inadvertant whitelist.
The other problem was that the code to prevent the worm from being sent back to the previous machine was either broken or just not there. So it wasn't just a problem with the speed, it was also a problem with an exponential increase in the number of messages at each node.
If this is the thing I saw some time ago, and it appears to be, then the reason it is not used is very cool... It doesn't work anymore!
You may ask, "How is that cool?" Well, it turns out that the through time the tension on the rubber bands changed and some of the wood warped subtly. The machine started to give incorrect answers. I guess that is the pre-computer equivalent of letting the magic smoke out.
Can't you wait the 15 minutes until you get home? You've never travelled further than fifteen minutes from home?
You've never travelled anywhere without a laptop? If you travel everywhere with your cell phone, laptop, and cables hanging all over the place... I don't believe you should be lecturing people about not having lives.
If the center of gravity of two bodies lies inside one of the bodies then that is the planet and the other is the moon. If the center of gravity is between the two objects then it is a two planet system.
Security is nice, but hopefully they will be doing something so some script kiddie doesn't DDOS a craft into Safe Mode.
One has to wonder if something like this can be taken from the PC to the embedded space in general. I'm sure Wind River (the owners of BSDi) would be annoyed by something like that.