I'd love to see what's in Martian caves. That said, I'm realistic enough to know a waste of money when I see one. Look, even if we find the caves inhabited by gentle, intelligent, naked mole rats, it's not going to help us a whit. Or them, for that matter.
Perhaps, but the kind of ingenius autonomous robot technology necessary will drive inovations here on earth. Sounds like a pretty fun competition, doesn't it? Build a robot which can navigate a cave and come back out again after accomplishing a few tasks on its own.
Communications are going to be a major issue. Gets a lot harder to send a signal out when you have 20+ meters of solid rock overhead. And even if you go down a sink-hole with a direct line of sight upwards, you'd have to send the signal straight up. Only solution I can see would be a repeater at the surface, possibly with a physical cable going down. It's pretty challenging overall.
All that would be tremendously simplified if we just sent a manned mission. Then a person could just climb down with an actual rope. With reduced gravity, it'd be quite easy (they may even be able to simply jump down and back up again, depending on how deep the hole is.)
Expect a robotic probe which is highly adaptable. Something which can examine the inside of a cave, make the right choices in moving around and then pop out to send back pictures/data for perhaps going back in to collect some samples or take a closer look at something interesting, i.e. crystal formations, which would certainly indicate something flowed around the surface for a very long time.
I saw this earlier and this thought immediately came to mind: Why send probes on dangerous cave missions when a machine that bores holes and analyses the sample could be built instead?
That's effectively what we're in the middle of, but it still takes a lot of support to make these happen and one screw up on unit conversion and throw away one massive outlay and years of support. Sending a team of people there would certainly accelerate things, but who wants to give up a few years on Earth to go there and back? (Not that it wouldn't be an adventure!) It's a long time with your team and you'd better all be able to get along.
I like Curiosity and hope it learns a lot for us. Sometimes just driving around you can see a lot, as example, drive through the American Southwest, near Death Valley and consider the forces at play to build that landscape.
I do worry though that most of what we're going to find is sand, more layers of sand underneath and then some sandstone under that, followed by yet more sandstone, all pushed around by Mars' winds for millions of years.
Pie in the sky, if budget slashers come into power in a couple months. Heck, they'll probably put Houston, Edwards and Cape Canaveral on the block - "Private industry can do it more better!"
>>> If we had video of Armstrong shooting up some kind of drug, or some kind of personal statement to that effect on tape or on paper, I think we'd all agree that trumped the test, wouldn't we?
No. He could be shooting a legal drug that's not banned. And a personal statement does not mean much. To add to my other post (below) I once had a security manager swear he saw me stealing. Turns-out he saw me handing brown packages to the postman. The security dope assumed I was stealing from the company (because that's what it looked like), but in reality the packages had been removed from my house, placed in my car, driven to work, and handed to the postman at 10am.
They had PS2 games inside them. Completely innocent of any crime but the manager's statement was "I saw him stealing packages from work". LIKEWISE just because a video or person claims to see Mr. Armstrong shooting-up does not prove a crime. We have no idea what he is shooting up. It could just be cancer medicine or insulin or sugar water (all legal per the rules).
Presume innocence until you can PROVE guilt. A video or statement does not prove anything.
In competition riders could be pulled for testing before or after a stage. Pretty hard to give yourself EPO while riding and all the cameras on you, it has to be injected, not taken as food, drink or from a patch. If tested before a stage a tested rider cannot return to his hotel or disappear into a team bus, but must go to the starting area. Out in the open it's pretty darn har to hide needles, bags of transfusion blood, etc.
It's a pretty weak whack the USADA is taking at Armstrong and I'm quite surprised he's not going into their den and ripping up the accusations in the faces of his accusers. But USADA having his wins, income, medal, etc, all yanked for all competitions from 1998 on based upon the word of people, but no hard evidence is something I expected Lance could have overturned in court... probably in a couple more years. Which makes much of this "tired of fighting, not going to fight anymore" understandable.
As pointed out in various sources, every time he gets one accuser discredited another one pops up in a never ending game of whack-a-mole. He's chosing to ignore USADA, which is probably the only defence he saw at some point. His attorneys served a letter to USADA stating he doesn't accept their findings. Wait to see what the UCI has to say.
I don't think anyone has ever believed that passing a drug test mean the person was clean for sure. Why do they store samples for X number of years in order to re-test them in the future, with better technology? It's because if it's found out later that somebody was doping, then his results are invalid.
If we find out some other way besides a drug test that somebody was doping, then his results are invalid.
The great irony here is Lance Armstrong donated funds for the most sophisticated drug testing machines which are used in labs for testing bicycle athletes as well as others. I've spent years reading the science of testing and the amatuer science dopers used to beat the system, many of the biggest cheats were caught with the doping substances and/or equipment. But some have been caught thanks to advances in scients which now establish baselines and profile racers, where certain blood blood hormones decrease over a 3 week race and a spike or leveling off at a higher than expected level will get a rider pulled. Microdosing may provide a tiny (some studies suggest negligible boost) assist, which are hard to measure, particularly if a the substance is consumed during the event and no marker remains at the end.
Taking the personalities out of it.. Lance was either astoundingly good at managing it or he didn't dope. Putting the personalities into it, you have to ask, what Lance does - what's in it for these people to testify against him, other than being rewarded with reduced or suspended bans? USADA clearly muddied the water and it probably wouldn't hold up in a court of law with out solid evidence.
I'm of the opinion he's innocent until actually proven guilty, not just on the word of a lot of people who have various reasons to disparage him (word from inside his own teams is he's demanding and a tough gut to get along with.)
I wouldn't take anything Landis says as fact, after his attempt to blackmail Greg Lemond (by telling what he knew of what Greg suffered as a child.) He's a pretty low creature. The rest I can't really say one way or the other, though Hincapie I might find most believable.
And the reason nothing passed was the Democrats were attempting to be bi-partisan. You can see how well that worked out for them.
GOP, the party of NO!
GOP became the party of Filibuster in the Senate. Just because you had a majority, doesn't mean you get things all your own way, a party needs 2/3rds support to end a filibuster. Democrats didn't have that and the GOP effectively stonewalled things, particularly nominations for cabinet and other federal posts.
Most of the people know how to disable that stuff.
It puzzles me the tech savvy crowd from/. cannot disable the transparencies of the Windows, but feel like complaining for almost about anything and ironically get modded up by other buch of tech savvy wannabes.
I tried a number of these things and the previews kept on coming, even after reboot. I tried thing even Microsoft suggested on their website. I don't know why my Win 7 install ignores my custom settings, but it does.
If only I could get rid of many of the most annoying features, like those damn pop-up previews along the task bar - f**king hell those are annoying.
I try to get it to look as plain as possible, I don't go for whizzy aero/glass/whatever looks. I just want things to work, because I'm often stressed and whizzy gets on my nerves.
How is this anything more than a high-tech version of the old "Beware of guard dog" signs?
Because it involves a laser or something which looks like one or is shiny (oooh!)
I see signs in a lot of yards Property Protected by Prominent Sounding Security Company.
I also see a lot of PRIVATE ROAD signs thrown up on public back roads to discourage adventurers. Google maps is pretty good, though for following right of ways and such.
You can have all the laws you want, but until people set themselves to backtracking this junk, finding the servers and maybe even catching those behind them, the laws mean exactly nothing.
It is nice to see them working on it, but I think more work could be done a little faster.
Apart from that: Headline and TFS is sensationalist trash. No direct observation of the planet being devoured as suggested, we'll have to wait for the new L2 space telescope for even a possibility of that. All we have is an anomalous Li spectrum which **suggests**, in accordance with **currently accepted theory** of lithium propagation, that a planet **may** have just fallen into its parent star.
I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened.
They are, in fact, an amoral bunch (notice their love of Ayn Rand) and their system of views is based on corporate culture.
Ayn Rand was 100% pro-choice and denounced Ronald Reagan as being "unable to defend rights at all" because he did not defend a woman's right to end the life of her unwanted fetus. So be claiming that people on the Right have a "love of Ayn Rand" in a thread that is specifically devoted to how much people on the Right oppose women's rights is ironic, to say the least.
It's pretty hilarious that everyone on both the Right and Left are claiming that the Right has something to do with Ayn Rand, who was specifically and bluntly critical of corporate leaders who used pull with the government to beat their competition, which is the only possible meaning anyone who's been paying attention can impute to "their system of views based on corporate culture".
Go ahead and criticize the GOP or Rand--there is a great deal to criticize in both--but don't think they have anything to do with each other.
Reagan was credited with winning, thanks in no small part to Southern Democrats backing him - what he and his campaign realized was the Southern states, which were strongly pro-democrat, were socially very conservative. From the 1980 election forward many left the Democratic Party and flocked to the now socially conservative Republican Party.
The old school Republicans have very little to do now with the party core, social conservative and paying lip service to fiscal conservativism (tho they're not shy about all pulling up to the trough and seeing how much they can each get for themselves, after all bringing home a lot of federal spending is time honored in both parties, just different focus on how to spend some of it.)
Slashdot Mirror
I'd love to see what's in Martian caves. That said, I'm realistic enough to know a waste of money when I see one. Look, even if we find the caves inhabited by gentle, intelligent, naked mole rats, it's not going to help us a whit. Or them, for that matter.
Perhaps, but the kind of ingenius autonomous robot technology necessary will drive inovations here on earth. Sounds like a pretty fun competition, doesn't it? Build a robot which can navigate a cave and come back out again after accomplishing a few tasks on its own.
What are you talking about? The budget slashers are already in power, since the 70s
The kind of cuts which may be coming will gut NASA. We've already seen some of the stark predictions.
Communications are going to be a major issue. Gets a lot harder to send a signal out when you have 20+ meters of solid rock overhead. And even if you go down a sink-hole with a direct line of sight upwards, you'd have to send the signal straight up. Only solution I can see would be a repeater at the surface, possibly with a physical cable going down. It's pretty challenging overall.
All that would be tremendously simplified if we just sent a manned mission. Then a person could just climb down with an actual rope. With reduced gravity, it'd be quite easy (they may even be able to simply jump down and back up again, depending on how deep the hole is.)
Expect a robotic probe which is highly adaptable. Something which can examine the inside of a cave, make the right choices in moving around and then pop out to send back pictures/data for perhaps going back in to collect some samples or take a closer look at something interesting, i.e. crystal formations, which would certainly indicate something flowed around the surface for a very long time.
I saw this earlier and this thought immediately came to mind: Why send probes on dangerous cave missions when a machine that bores holes and analyses the sample could be built instead?
That's effectively what we're in the middle of, but it still takes a lot of support to make these happen and one screw up on unit conversion and throw away one massive outlay and years of support. Sending a team of people there would certainly accelerate things, but who wants to give up a few years on Earth to go there and back? (Not that it wouldn't be an adventure!) It's a long time with your team and you'd better all be able to get along.
I like Curiosity and hope it learns a lot for us. Sometimes just driving around you can see a lot, as example, drive through the American Southwest, near Death Valley and consider the forces at play to build that landscape.
I do worry though that most of what we're going to find is sand, more layers of sand underneath and then some sandstone under that, followed by yet more sandstone, all pushed around by Mars' winds for millions of years.
Pie in the sky, if budget slashers come into power in a couple months. Heck, they'll probably put Houston, Edwards and Cape Canaveral on the block - "Private industry can do it more better!"
Yuh.
I'll be honest; the first thing that popped into my head was trilobites. To me, it was a very interesting news day for about 1.8 seconds.
Typical attention span for the interwebs these days.
GET OFF MY LAWN.
Coelacanths on your lawn?
He should turn down his sprinkler.
>>> If we had video of Armstrong shooting up some kind of drug, or some kind of personal statement to that effect on tape or on paper, I think we'd all agree that trumped the test, wouldn't we?
No.
He could be shooting a legal drug that's not banned. And a personal statement does not mean much. To add to my other post (below) I once had a security manager swear he saw me stealing. Turns-out he saw me handing brown packages to the postman. The security dope assumed I was stealing from the company (because that's what it looked like), but in reality the packages had been removed from my house, placed in my car, driven to work, and handed to the postman at 10am.
They had PS2 games inside them. Completely innocent of any crime but the manager's statement was "I saw him stealing packages from work". LIKEWISE just because a video or person claims to see Mr. Armstrong shooting-up does not prove a crime. We have no idea what he is shooting up. It could just be cancer medicine or insulin or sugar water (all legal per the rules).
Presume innocence until you can PROVE guilt. A video or statement does not prove anything.
In competition riders could be pulled for testing before or after a stage. Pretty hard to give yourself EPO while riding and all the cameras on you, it has to be injected, not taken as food, drink or from a patch. If tested before a stage a tested rider cannot return to his hotel or disappear into a team bus, but must go to the starting area. Out in the open it's pretty darn har to hide needles, bags of transfusion blood, etc.
It's a pretty weak whack the USADA is taking at Armstrong and I'm quite surprised he's not going into their den and ripping up the accusations in the faces of his accusers. But USADA having his wins, income, medal, etc, all yanked for all competitions from 1998 on based upon the word of people, but no hard evidence is something I expected Lance could have overturned in court ... probably in a couple more years. Which makes much of this "tired of fighting, not going to fight anymore" understandable.
As pointed out in various sources, every time he gets one accuser discredited another one pops up in a never ending game of whack-a-mole. He's chosing to ignore USADA, which is probably the only defence he saw at some point. His attorneys served a letter to USADA stating he doesn't accept their findings. Wait to see what the UCI has to say.
I don't think anyone has ever believed that passing a drug test mean the person was clean for sure. Why do they store samples for X number of years in order to re-test them in the future, with better technology? It's because if it's found out later that somebody was doping, then his results are invalid.
If we find out some other way besides a drug test that somebody was doping, then his results are invalid.
The great irony here is Lance Armstrong donated funds for the most sophisticated drug testing machines which are used in labs for testing bicycle athletes as well as others. I've spent years reading the science of testing and the amatuer science dopers used to beat the system, many of the biggest cheats were caught with the doping substances and/or equipment. But some have been caught thanks to advances in scients which now establish baselines and profile racers, where certain blood blood hormones decrease over a 3 week race and a spike or leveling off at a higher than expected level will get a rider pulled. Microdosing may provide a tiny (some studies suggest negligible boost) assist, which are hard to measure, particularly if a the substance is consumed during the event and no marker remains at the end.
Taking the personalities out of it .. Lance was either astoundingly good at managing it or he didn't dope. Putting the personalities into it, you have to ask, what Lance does - what's in it for these people to testify against him, other than being rewarded with reduced or suspended bans? USADA clearly muddied the water and it probably wouldn't hold up in a court of law with out solid evidence.
I'm of the opinion he's innocent until actually proven guilty, not just on the word of a lot of people who have various reasons to disparage him (word from inside his own teams is he's demanding and a tough gut to get along with.)
I wouldn't take anything Landis says as fact, after his attempt to blackmail Greg Lemond (by telling what he knew of what Greg suffered as a child.) He's a pretty low creature. The rest I can't really say one way or the other, though Hincapie I might find most believable.
And the reason nothing passed was the Democrats were attempting to be bi-partisan. You can see how well that worked out for them.
GOP, the party of NO!
GOP became the party of Filibuster in the Senate. Just because you had a majority, doesn't mean you get things all your own way, a party needs 2/3rds support to end a filibuster. Democrats didn't have that and the GOP effectively stonewalled things, particularly nominations for cabinet and other federal posts.
Absolutely nothing of value was lost.
Perhaps some protesters. Hope they have better sense than to stick around when the wind starts to howl like a certain demented radio peRsonaLity.
>like those damn pop-up previews along the task bar - f**king hell those are annoying.
You can disable them from taskbar settings ... dumbass.
All you needed to do was google "how to disable popup preview Windows 7" and it's the first link.
and it failed, so I kept looking. I still have these damn preview popups.
Most of the people know how to disable that stuff.
It puzzles me the tech savvy crowd from /. cannot disable the transparencies of the Windows, but feel like complaining for almost about anything and ironically get modded up by other buch of tech savvy wannabes.
I tried a number of these things and the previews kept on coming, even after reboot. I tried thing even Microsoft suggested on their website. I don't know why my Win 7 install ignores my custom settings, but it does.
If only I could get rid of many of the most annoying features, like those damn pop-up previews along the task bar - f**king hell those are annoying.
I try to get it to look as plain as possible, I don't go for whizzy aero/glass/whatever looks. I just want things to work, because I'm often stressed and whizzy gets on my nerves.
How is this anything more than a high-tech version of the old "Beware of guard dog" signs?
Because it involves a laser or something which looks like one or is shiny (oooh!)
I see signs in a lot of yards Property Protected by Prominent Sounding Security Company.
I also see a lot of PRIVATE ROAD signs thrown up on public back roads to discourage adventurers. Google maps is pretty good, though for following right of ways and such.
Create a holding company.
Have it buy a cabin in the woods.
Me move into cabin in the woods.
Have holding company pay taxes, utilities, etc.
If I really wanted to hide, set up a network of holding companies to hide the holding company with the cabin.
This implies that there are about 1.2 million bots worldwide. Seems low.
True.
Perhaps the others are all at work managing sock-puppets on facebook.
More evidence that the law is working.
Law? Try people actually working on it.
You can have all the laws you want, but until people set themselves to backtracking this junk, finding the servers and maybe even catching those behind them, the laws mean exactly nothing.
It is nice to see them working on it, but I think more work could be done a little faster.
Please don't tell me it was off for peer review!?
Apart from that: Headline and TFS is sensationalist trash. No direct observation of the planet being devoured as suggested, we'll have to wait for the new L2 space telescope for even a possibility of that. All we have is an anomalous Li spectrum which **suggests**, in accordance with **currently accepted theory** of lithium propagation, that a planet **may** have just fallen into its parent star.
People run for public office on even less.
Back in my day we didn't devour 'em, we just rocked 'em like my friend Sonny here: http://www.facebook.com/officialsonnymendez
What about Hotblack Desiato and Disaster Area? They rock planets on seismic orders of magnitude.
Just grab your towel and your copy of "The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy". You DO have your copy, don't you??
Of course I have a copy of my towel.
wait wut?
200,000 voices were silenced.
Not particularly good voices, with anything worthwhile to say.
I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened.
I hope Jor-El got Kal-El off in time.
They are, in fact, an amoral bunch (notice their love of Ayn Rand) and their system of views is based on corporate culture.
Ayn Rand was 100% pro-choice and denounced Ronald Reagan as being "unable to defend rights at all" because he did not defend a woman's right to end the life of her unwanted fetus. So be claiming that people on the Right have a "love of Ayn Rand" in a thread that is specifically devoted to how much people on the Right oppose women's rights is ironic, to say the least.
It's pretty hilarious that everyone on both the Right and Left are claiming that the Right has something to do with Ayn Rand, who was specifically and bluntly critical of corporate leaders who used pull with the government to beat their competition, which is the only possible meaning anyone who's been paying attention can impute to "their system of views based on corporate culture".
Go ahead and criticize the GOP or Rand--there is a great deal to criticize in both--but don't think they have anything to do with each other.
Reagan was credited with winning, thanks in no small part to Southern Democrats backing him - what he and his campaign realized was the Southern states, which were strongly pro-democrat, were socially very conservative. From the 1980 election forward many left the Democratic Party and flocked to the now socially conservative Republican Party.
The old school Republicans have very little to do now with the party core, social conservative and paying lip service to fiscal conservativism (tho they're not shy about all pulling up to the trough and seeing how much they can each get for themselves, after all bringing home a lot of federal spending is time honored in both parties, just different focus on how to spend some of it.)
This is also stuff that matters.
Yeah, like, where do little nerds come from?