But one thing to consider is whether the damage from a fallen sattelite is covered by one's home owner insurance? Auto? Normally falling objects from the sky have been named as evil portents, and things have been struck down by an act of gh*d. But this isn't an act of gh*d, it required a conscious act to direct the sattelite to re-enter.
Would I be able to sue a company that has gone defunct, or the person who actually pushed the button? I'm just curious if anybody knew of where the liability laid. I know that some insurance companys can tend to be a bit on the anal side when handing out money, but what if I or a loved one were hit by one of these sattelites? Would they still pay out? I should check my policy a little closer.
How many more Iridium sattelites are in orbit though? How many other 1 in 10000 chances do we get over the next few years as each is de-orbited?
I might be totaly cool to build a double desktop cabinet with 2 14" monitors, and two PCs
with the floppy/cdrom accessible to the outside.
If you tilt the monitors, they only remain visible to the respective players. I chose 14" monitors just because they're cheap.
Now, connect the PCs with a cross-over ethernet cable, and you have a bitchin' head-to-head any PC game you want.
Perhaps it has been done before, but I think it would be cool! It would certainly be a conversation topic.
I'm certain that we had samples of the world's
oldest mold in our old flat. There was just
something about that place that cried out for
fresh basalt and searing radiation!
Seriously though, it's nice that despite our best efforts so far, life will go on. What I'd be curious about is if they find evidence of life between the ocean development and land development. It would be interesting to find out if the lifeform changed significantly, or if this was an indication of some change to the atmosphere of the planet allowing for said changes.
If so, then life is constant, everything else is fleeting...
Still, it's nice to know that there's a good chance that the mold we didn't kill in the bathroom will still survive...
Every once in a while, I imagine myself writing a script to automatically generate pseudo-encrypted appearing emails. I imagine sending said non-sensical non-meaningful messages to large corporation mailers. I expect on occasion, I would receive e-mails asking not to send them any more messages, and then I would reply - "Message received - the owl hoots at midnight..."
Government organizations are also another good target for said messages!
And then I imagine either lawyers or Authority knocking on my door, seizing my equipment, and getting locked up for nuisance reasons...
You had it easy - we had to power the machine with bits of discarded chad from American elections and PDP-11 punch tape. And even then, we had to wait every 4 years to do a decent compile of Trek let alone running it.
Mind you, once we got the turing machine to actually run Trek, we had had to wait forever for it to figure out that it was playing Trek...
If (really big if since things should get cooked rather nastily on re-entry) things were to be contaminated - I expect it would be covered over in the damp areas with a black/brown/green mold that just smells funny.
According to the article, Mir will be put down "...target dates for bringing the space station down are between February 27 and 28."
Is that a choice between February 27 and February 28, or some mysterious date inserted between those two days that I'm not aware of?
Seriously though - it'll be too bad to see the station out of commission. I don't know specifically what scientific data was gleaned from its mission, but it had to have contributed to our understanding of humans in space. I hope it still remains in the history books as a good first!
On the cool side though, it would be neat to film it going down from either the shuttle or the ISS... And certainly from the ground... IMAX of course...
I've been with a company before where stock options had been handed out as bonuses - admittedly, in the earlier days, I was able to rebuild the roof on my house, get a new fence, re-do the brick and mortar on a back wall without blinking an eye. On the other hand, there have been days where my options couldn't afford me a cheese sandwich despite promises galore.
People get rich, they get poor. They gamble, they don't. It's buyer/employee beware - get a decent salary, don't live beyond your means, and enjoy the simple things in life. When the perks come, you'll welcome them, but if they don't, you're still in the same place you were. Nothing to get terribly upset about.
I'm currently in a startup, quite happy with the salary, the perks, the travel, and yeah, the options? They're fine - I consider them a crap-shoot/gamble. If things take off, then fine, if not, I'll have a job within 2 weeks of bailing at a company down the road.
How has all of this up and down affected me - zero! I still get up, go to work, get paid, have my beer, enjoy life.
PS - My wife made good call, moved funds over to Energy and Gas as soon as the first SUVs came out. Keep up the good work, fools...
And now, we can have a room full of monkey brains teleoperate arms typing on typewriters on the exterior of the soon-to-be abandoned space station Mir, working on reproducing the entire works of Shakespeare!
Only this time, in the absence of atmosphere (less drag) and in microgravity! Woooo!
But seriously though, with the advances in neural-interfaces such as this, we might approach Implant technology as in Niven & Pournelle's Oath of Fealty - the ultimate PDA! Palm is doomed when compared with Implants.
The ramifications will be huge - existing space missions such as Galileo has flown through intense radiation fields and still operates, gathering usefull data.
This experiment with better shielding and processors built to handle radiation, will help extend similar future missions.
As an additional aspect, satellites, probes, may be reduce risks of mission failure which could help encourage politicians to spend considerably more money on further explorations.
But seriously, I'm curious about how many terrestrial applications are affected by stray radiation which could be made more reliable by this technology. I'm imagining microchip probes during CAT scans, pacemakers that won't go "bing", and of course reliable smart equipment in nuclear research.
OpenSource the DNA! I can imagine however, a future world populated by people who are Tailored and others who are "Free-range."
Personally, I talked with my only living creator,
my Mom - and although she was initially against me GPLing my DNA, I explained to her that although she was a co-creator of me, that I did have a right to choose what I do with my life, including what I want to do with my DNA. She really liked the idea that people could tinker and modify my genes as long as she retains the original credits - she never liked my nose, and perhaps Glebite-3.99Nose-pre-4.0.diff patch would work out for the better...
But as for companies claiming ownership, my Mom would like to talk with their CEO about 26 hours of labour and how much of the pain she would like to share with them.
To ease the constraints of laundry facilities on a manned mission, just hang the clothes outside the station (perhaps using the antenna array of the Huygens) and wait for the amonia and methane rain to get those whites their brightest...
We could call it: Common Object Bollock'd Official Language... Yikes - COBOLizing things is just wrong! It was wrong before, and still is!
Re:Higher Ground that we won't see...
on
The High Frontier
·
· Score: 2
But that's the point - cut ties just like some of the colonists of the "new world"... This time, there are a lot fewer natives. It would have to be understood that people moving and working on the moon would be doing so on a permament basis.
Tourism is a luxury that isn't included in the initial colonization - for business purposes, there will be people moving back and forth - but for the real bang for the buck, people have to stay behind and have children themselves. I don't even envision tourism as being viable until waaaay after permament colonies are present, and people move beyond basic survival requirements.
But you do have an interesting point about gravity - we do need more research on minimal gravity required for basic and continued human health. Hopefully 1/6th would be good enough - we know that 0 is pretty harmfull...
Higher Ground that we won't see...
on
The High Frontier
·
· Score: 4
Although it makes sense, I'm not envisioning that it happens anytime soon... In fact, I'm not seeing a real drive to the commercialization of space with the plain fact that getting off this planet safely and inserting into an orbit, and then moving to locations that you need to get to, and survive is not brain surgery - it's rocket science.
And as easy as the math may be to work out, and state on paper, it takes an incredible infrastructure to get to that stage - so far, Russia and the USA are the only ones to launch people. China is catching up, and I expect that India will catch up as well, but it's not as easy as it looks. It took a huge amount of resources and energy to do so.
There is also a considerable hesitancy to send people into such a hostile environment without the immediate rewards being available. People left the "old world" because of political and population and philosophical reasons to a place where they had atmosphere, water, and some sort of food supply as well as something to sell.. There was incentive.
Although I see an incredible benefit to moving into space, a lot of people would not see it that way. Heinlein really did it best when he wrote "The Man Who Sold The Moon." I mean - there had to be a real good reason to go there - greed. And no, it wasn't easy, and people died in his space exploration stories.
Forget the space station - move to the moon, start working with a lower-gravity world, strip mine it for all it's worth - do nuclear fuel research there, and yes, grow food, have children, allow them to have children - then we will be on higher ground.
On the lighter side of it all...
on
Living Terrors
·
· Score: 2
Despite what my step-father has said, I am a vector! I have both magnitude and direction - forward! He only thought I had magnitude.
Sorry - couldn't resist.
But sure - viral/bio attacks are quite nasty with this day and age of commercial travel, etc as the poster has pointed out.
What I'd be curious about is how many people would be able to handle a true quarantine of a large city? If a real nasty bugger were to make it into a major metropolitan centre, I'm not sure many people could haul out their family members and neighbours to the death cart a la Monty Python. It wouldn't be pleasant, but I think I could do it.
On that same issue - the aftermath of this disaster would certainly send a lot of people into real shock - face it: how much death does the modern civilization have to deal with on a day to day basis?
Slashdot Mirror
"I like them odds..." - Homer Simpson...
But one thing to consider is whether the damage from a fallen sattelite is covered by one's home owner insurance? Auto? Normally falling objects from the sky have been named as evil portents, and things have been struck down by an act of gh*d. But this isn't an act of gh*d, it required a conscious act to direct the sattelite to re-enter.
Would I be able to sue a company that has gone defunct, or the person who actually pushed the button? I'm just curious if anybody knew of where the liability laid. I know that some insurance companys can tend to be a bit on the anal side when handing out money, but what if I or a loved one were hit by one of these sattelites? Would they still pay out? I should check my policy a little closer.
How many more Iridium sattelites are in orbit though? How many other 1 in 10000 chances do we get over the next few years as each is de-orbited?
Just asking...
I might be totaly cool to build a double desktop cabinet with 2 14" monitors, and two PCs with the floppy/cdrom accessible to the outside. If you tilt the monitors, they only remain visible to the respective players. I chose 14" monitors just because they're cheap.
Now, connect the PCs with a cross-over ethernet cable, and you have a bitchin' head-to-head any PC game you want.
Perhaps it has been done before, but I think it would be cool! It would certainly be a conversation topic.
Who knows...
I'm certain that we had samples of the world's oldest mold in our old flat. There was just something about that place that cried out for fresh basalt and searing radiation!
Seriously though, it's nice that despite our best efforts so far, life will go on. What I'd be curious about is if they find evidence of life between the ocean development and land development. It would be interesting to find out if the lifeform changed significantly, or if this was an indication of some change to the atmosphere of the planet allowing for said changes.
If so, then life is constant, everything else is fleeting...
Still, it's nice to know that there's a good chance that the mold we didn't kill in the bathroom will still survive...
Every once in a while, I imagine myself writing a script to automatically generate pseudo-encrypted appearing emails. I imagine sending said non-sensical non-meaningful messages to large corporation mailers. I expect on occasion, I would receive e-mails asking not to send them any more messages, and then I would reply - "Message received - the owl hoots at midnight..."
Government organizations are also another good target for said messages!
And then I imagine either lawyers or Authority knocking on my door, seizing my equipment, and getting locked up for nuisance reasons...
Until then: "Sdfd wersl. Jdibg aty qpolacvcc!"
You had it easy - we had to power the machine with bits of discarded chad from American elections and PDP-11 punch tape. And even then, we had to wait every 4 years to do a decent compile of Trek let alone running it.
Mind you, once we got the turing machine to actually run Trek, we had had to wait forever for it to figure out that it was playing Trek...
If (really big if since things should get cooked rather nastily on re-entry) things were to be contaminated - I expect it would be covered over in the damp areas with a black/brown/green mold that just smells funny.
According to the article, Mir will be put down "...target dates for bringing the space station down are between February 27 and 28."
Is that a choice between February 27 and February 28, or some mysterious date inserted between those two days that I'm not aware of?
Seriously though - it'll be too bad to see the station out of commission. I don't know specifically what scientific data was gleaned from its mission, but it had to have contributed to our understanding of humans in space. I hope it still remains in the history books as a good first!
On the cool side though, it would be neat to film it going down from either the shuttle or the ISS... And certainly from the ground... IMAX of course...
You hit it on the nose there: Luck! and I think that people tend to forget that it is a gamble.
"Step right up folks, invest your money here in my little dot-com...", says the man in the tall hat.
I've been with a company before where stock options had been handed out as bonuses - admittedly, in the earlier days, I was able to rebuild the roof on my house, get a new fence, re-do the brick and mortar on a back wall without blinking an eye. On the other hand, there have been days where my options couldn't afford me a cheese sandwich despite promises galore.
People get rich, they get poor. They gamble, they don't. It's buyer/employee beware - get a decent salary, don't live beyond your means, and enjoy the simple things in life. When the perks come, you'll welcome them, but if they don't, you're still in the same place you were. Nothing to get terribly upset about.
I'm currently in a startup, quite happy with the salary, the perks, the travel, and yeah, the options? They're fine - I consider them a crap-shoot/gamble. If things take off, then fine, if not, I'll have a job within 2 weeks of bailing at a company down the road.
How has all of this up and down affected me - zero! I still get up, go to work, get paid, have my beer, enjoy life.
PS - My wife made good call, moved funds over to Energy and Gas as soon as the first SUVs came out. Keep up the good work, fools...
And now, we can have a room full of monkey brains teleoperate arms typing on typewriters on the exterior of the soon-to-be abandoned space station Mir, working on reproducing the entire works of Shakespeare!
Only this time, in the absence of atmosphere (less drag) and in microgravity! Woooo!
But seriously though, with the advances in neural-interfaces such as this, we might approach Implant technology as in Niven & Pournelle's Oath of Fealty - the ultimate PDA! Palm is doomed when compared with Implants.
The ramifications will be huge - existing space missions such as Galileo has flown through intense radiation fields and still operates, gathering usefull data.
This experiment with better shielding and processors built to handle radiation, will help extend similar future missions.
As an additional aspect, satellites, probes, may be reduce risks of mission failure which could help encourage politicians to spend considerably more money on further explorations.
But seriously, I'm curious about how many terrestrial applications are affected by stray radiation which could be made more reliable by this technology. I'm imagining microchip probes during CAT scans, pacemakers that won't go "bing", and of course reliable smart equipment in nuclear research.
Just let me know when your father shows up to sue the patent people - I'd love to watch the court proceedings...
(Atheist not holding his breath.)
OpenSource the DNA! I can imagine however, a future world populated by people who are Tailored and others who are "Free-range." Personally, I talked with my only living creator, my Mom - and although she was initially against me GPLing my DNA, I explained to her that although she was a co-creator of me, that I did have a right to choose what I do with my life, including what I want to do with my DNA. She really liked the idea that people could tinker and modify my genes as long as she retains the original credits - she never liked my nose, and perhaps Glebite-3.99Nose-pre-4.0.diff patch would work out for the better... But as for companies claiming ownership, my Mom would like to talk with their CEO about 26 hours of labour and how much of the pain she would like to share with them.
To ease the constraints of laundry facilities on a manned mission, just hang the clothes outside the station (perhaps using the antenna array of the Huygens) and wait for the amonia and methane rain to get those whites their brightest...
We could call it: Common Object Bollock'd Official Language... Yikes - COBOLizing things is just wrong! It was wrong before, and still is!
But that's the point - cut ties just like some of the colonists of the "new world"... This time, there are a lot fewer natives. It would have to be understood that people moving and working on the moon would be doing so on a permament basis.
Tourism is a luxury that isn't included in the initial colonization - for business purposes, there will be people moving back and forth - but for the real bang for the buck, people have to stay behind and have children themselves. I don't even envision tourism as being viable until waaaay after permament colonies are present, and people move beyond basic survival requirements.
But you do have an interesting point about gravity - we do need more research on minimal gravity required for basic and continued human health. Hopefully 1/6th would be good enough - we know that 0 is pretty harmfull...
Although it makes sense, I'm not envisioning that it happens anytime soon... In fact, I'm not seeing a real drive to the commercialization of space with the plain fact that getting off this planet safely and inserting into an orbit, and then moving to locations that you need to get to, and survive is not brain surgery - it's rocket science.
And as easy as the math may be to work out, and state on paper, it takes an incredible infrastructure to get to that stage - so far, Russia and the USA are the only ones to launch people. China is catching up, and I expect that India will catch up as well, but it's not as easy as it looks. It took a huge amount of resources and energy to do so.
There is also a considerable hesitancy to send people into such a hostile environment without the immediate rewards being available. People left the "old world" because of political and population and philosophical reasons to a place where they had atmosphere, water, and some sort of food supply as well as something to sell.. There was incentive.
Although I see an incredible benefit to moving into space, a lot of people would not see it that way. Heinlein really did it best when he wrote "The Man Who Sold The Moon." I mean - there had to be a real good reason to go there - greed. And no, it wasn't easy, and people died in his space exploration stories.
Forget the space station - move to the moon, start working with a lower-gravity world, strip mine it for all it's worth - do nuclear fuel research there, and yes, grow food, have children, allow them to have children - then we will be on higher ground.
Despite what my step-father has said, I am a vector! I have both magnitude and direction - forward! He only thought I had magnitude.
Sorry - couldn't resist.
But sure - viral/bio attacks are quite nasty with this day and age of commercial travel, etc as the poster has pointed out.
What I'd be curious about is how many people would be able to handle a true quarantine of a large city? If a real nasty bugger were to make it into a major metropolitan centre, I'm not sure many people could haul out their family members and neighbours to the death cart a la Monty Python. It wouldn't be pleasant, but I think I could do it.
On that same issue - the aftermath of this disaster would certainly send a lot of people into real shock - face it: how much death does the modern civilization have to deal with on a day to day basis?