Remember...you're looking for a rational solution to a whackjob problem.
Yep, this is the a classic case of trying to fight irrationality with logic. The classic example is the apocryphal story of the med student working in a psych ward trying to cure a delusional man with reason. The man was under the delusion that he was dead.
"So you're dead," says the med student. "Yes indeed," says the man, "I've been dead for nearly ten years."
"OK then, do dead people bleed?" the med student asks.
"Don't be absurd," replies the man, "of course dead people don't bleed."
So the med student grabs the man's hand, and jabs the mans thumb with a pin, which then begins to bleed.
"Well what do you know!" exclaims the man, staring in wide-eyed amazement at the drop of blood welling up on his thumb, "Dead people do bleed!"
Speaking of which, I was re-waching my vhs tape of "Metropolis" (silent film made in 1927 about the future) and was amazed to spot a metric clock on the wall! (just did a search and found a shot of it.
Looking at the picture, I guess they couldn't find an actual metric clock. It has 10 "hours" marked out, but still 60 pips for the minutes. Of course this was nearly 80 years ago and the only way to "freeze frame" was with an editing machine, so the props guys probably didn't think that level of detail was necessary...
# It will be the death of Apple's hardware division
# Apple will have a hard time supporting the myriad boards, chipsets, and peripherals of PCs
# Piracy/sharing (pick your preferred new-speak term) will mean a revenue-less expansion of the install base
Why is there always the presumption that a system with an x86 CPU will be PC compatible? Someone postulates that Apple may be considering using Intel CPUs, and everyone makes the giant leap of (il)logic that Apple is considering adopting the PC platform as a whole. It is entirely possible to use the same CPU in a totally incompatible system. Look at the Original 68000 based Macs. Were they compatible with the 68000 based Amiga? It is only logical to assume that were Apple to dump IBM and adopt (say) the Pentium-M as their new CPU it would be installed on a proprietary Apple motherboard, not a $40 Abit or Tyan from Taiwan.
but its a kind of joke typical for america... no knowledge of other world parts and mixing different cultures! go back in time to archimedes and tell him (who was a slave under romans for some time) that you think he writes in latin
OK genius, let's hear your super-enlightened, non-american rendition of the joke. Latin is generally the only ancient language well known enough that one can appropriate a couple word endings, apply them to modern language, and still get the point across. Yes, it would have been more accurate if he'd had Archimedes writing ancient greek, you pedantic troll, but due to lack of greek characters on our keyboards, and the fact that almost nobody would be able to read it, it would no longer be an effective joke because no one would get it.
Reminds me of the story of the first carrier landing of an F-111. After what was apparently an extremely harrowing experience landing, a journalist asked the pilot "if you had a choice between landing the F-111 or any other aircraft on a carrier, which would you choose?" The pilot said "Any other aircraft". Needless to say, consideration of the F-111 as a possible fleet defense craft was dropped.
Since these things are lasting so long, I wonder how much less it would cost to mass produce these rovers... maybe cover the moon (i know moondust is harsh) with them or something. I bet a dozen of these on things on the moon could give us some economic payback within our lifetimes.
They don't really have the capacity to perform any useful work, so their net productivity is a negative number. With 12 of them the "payback" is that negative number times 12. "I know we're selling below cost, but we make up for it in volume!"
Does anyone remember Baby Pac-Man (pinball + maze arcade)?:)
Funny you should mention, as just last week I stripped all the interesting parts out of a Baby Pac-Man machine someone dumped in the alley behind my workplace. I don't remember ever seeing one in action, but judging by the miniscule pinball field, it looked like a pretty weak concept.
Think about programming YAPMC (Yet Another Pac-Man Clone): at first sight, you think: simple. But you have to deal with timing, player controls, graphics/sprites etc., sounds, the game 'map' (pills, walls, powerups etc.), and even 'Artificial Intelligence' (ghost movement, yeah I know they're really dumb, but still).
Have you never programmed a game before? All of that stuff is simple. I could knock off YAPMC in about 2 days. The part that's not trivial is doing it 25 years ago, in assembly language, within the limits of the hardware in those days.
heh , Talk about stating the obvious.TO rephrase that , Companys who spend less and get more will be big winners.Is that not a basic principle
Not only that, it's been Dilberted:
BUSINESSMAN: Wait, I've got it! All we need to do to improve profits is lower costs and increase revenues!.....AAAAAAGH! My eyes!
DILBERT: That would be from the flash of the blindingly obvious.
Can anyone explain to me why you'd want to do this? As far as I can tell from screenshots I've seen, all that does is make the menu bar *larger*. SO you're not saving any space, or at best - what 5 pixels?
The menu bar gets slightly larger, but then it's still significantly smaller than the menu bar PLUS a toolbar below it. I also prefer the back-forward-reload icons above the center of the window rather than left justified. It doesn't save a huge amount of space, but at 1024x768 on my stupid slow-scrolling laptop every extra pixel counts. You actually outlined my complaint better than I did. It's not so much that I need to move the stuff-- it's that the Opera people have decided on their own that I shouldn't be able to. That's just lame.
What kind of fools to these media companies employ that come up with cockamamie schemes like this? With the original DIVX and those DVDs that go opaque 24 hours after opening, the consumer was only slightly encumbered and those both flopped miserably or didn't even make it to market. This biometric bullshit has obvious deal-killing stumbling blocks all over its adoption path:
1) everyone must buy a new DVD player.
2) only the person who purchased the DVD can play it, so forget buying DVDs as gifts or picking up the latest inane Spoogebob Squatpants for the kids-- they gots ta' buy it theyselves!
3) every DVD retailer is going to have to buy and maintain a bunch of MPAA approved RFID writer/biometric reader devices
4) WHOOPS! No way to record biometric data at home! DVD sales over the internet are impossible
5) "What do you mean, I can't sell this DVD on half.com?" Simple transfer of ownership is now IMPOSSIBLE!
Great idea, guys! People will eat it right up, I'm sure! "What? a large and onerous encumberance with no upside for me? Oh yeah, sign me up for that!" Buncha' freakin' tards...
You'd better not make a mistake with one.
You'd better hope their orbits are stable.
You'd better hope their orbits don't decay
What if one gets fired by accident or software bug?
The basic problem is that once the weapon is deployed into orbit, it's already half fired.
You're probably one of those guys who thinks you can accidentally detonate a nuclear warhead by knocking it over. What, in your mind, constitutes "making a mistake with one"? Bad orbits end up with satellites burning up in the atmosphere, not indiscriminately raining fire on babies or something. Fired by accident? Fired by a software bug? Yeah, just like happens all the time with our ICBMs. I fail to see how orbit constitutes "half-fired". Care to elaborate on your bizarre assertions?
I'd love to use Opera because it's fast, but until it lets me cram the back-forward-reload icons, google box, and address box all on the same line as the "File Edit View... Help" menus, forget it. All the other browsers let me do that.
Opera has movable toolbars, Sparky. Maybe you need to sit at the kids table until you learn the difference between movable and dragable.
No you can move icons. The toolbars are in a fixed order and only exist stretched from one side of the screen to the other. Now, one could call the toolbars "movable" in the sense that you can take all the icons from one and drag them to the other, but that's only true if you accept Opera's stupidly limited definition of "toolbar". The "File Edit View... Help" bar at the top is not considered a toolbar, so all that dead space after "Help" is just that-- dead space. The address bar is not considered a toolbar, but rather an integral part of each tabbed window in the MDI. The way I have Firefox set up is with "File Edit View", back forward reload home icons, google search box, and address bar all on the top line. Let's see you do that with Opera. Back to the kids table, junior.
If the ISS is a useful science tool and it is part of the long-term aim of landing a man on Mars, wouldn't it be more interesting to tell the astronauts that there was no replacement on the way and that they would have to solve the problem themselves?
Interesting maybe, in a "reality TV" sort of way; but not at all reasonable. Presumably we wouldn't send out a mars mission without a shitload of tools and parts, and the craft would be designed specifically for easy on-site user maintenance. The ISS is a lot like a hotel-- if you've got any problem more serious than a light bulb out, you pretty much have to call downstairs and wait for the maintenance guy to come up with a spare part from the basement and fix it.
While I agree with the statement to be the best of my knowledge, I would remind you to be caucious in accepting claims from any Soviet Government Department. I'm sure they would not be very forthcoming if they had lost people in space back then, hell if they overstate production of boots by a factor of 8 then they might lie about something really important too.
Yeah, there's really no telling. I was recently reading Heinlein's account of his trip to the Soviet Union back in the Bad Old Days, and there's an interesting anecdote about this very subject. He was there quite a while before Gagarin's flight, so this was pretty early on in the race. One day he's talking to a Soviet Air Force officer who boasts that the previous day's space launch was manned, and that they were the first into orbit. For a whole day, everyone was talking about how they were first into space. Then, suddenly, the official party line changed. It was only an unmanned test flight. And also, they'd lost contact with it. Nothing to see here, move along. Who knows how many of those there were, and how many were actually unmannned...
Uh, why not just plug one in on the earth and hook an O2 meter to the output? Viola, you find out how well it performs over a long period of time. If you want to try out a different design or set of conditions, you can just reach over and tinker with it, and not have to send a shuttle into space.
Because a mars mission will require more than just an oxygen generator. By the time you've assembled all the critical components into a testable system, you've essentially got most of a space station.
As someone else pointed out, the amount of effort to cock a crossbow isn't necessarily tremendous - but it's definitely there. As I pointed out, using an underling isn't a technological P&C.
Funny you should bring that up also, as one of the other things crossbows allowed which bows didn't was all manner of mechanical contrivances, from levers to cranks and pulleys, designed to allow even the weakest noob to cock it. Like I said, you could put a crossbow in anyone's hands and they'd be able to use it with minimal instruction.
And when you see somebody cock a gun in a movie, it's almost always stupid.
Yeah, if I had a nickel for every stupid "cock the gun as a threat" scene. My favorite is when the cocking noise was obviously foleyed in later becausee some dimwit editor said "oooo, have it sound like he's cocking the gun there". Particularly amusing is when they foley in a "hammer cock" and the character is holding a bloody Glock (cough)Lost(/cough).
I know of one product, a flight planning and maintenance tracking app for small aviation businesses, that's still written entirely in Pascal. They guy who wrote it has been trying to convert it to C++, but has so far been unsuccessful. It's a terrible crawling horror of a program. It is, at least, Y2K compliant.
I usually take "point and click interface" to mean "interface that somebody probably smart put a lot of work into so that any unqualified moron can make do more or less what they want to great effect, although the user may not have considered or understand the ramifications of their actions"
Funny you should phrase it this way, because this is exactly the reason the crossbow was developed. Archers with regular bows required years of training, while even a particularly thickheaded soldier could be taught to use a crossbow in about a week.
I didn't see anyone claim that this should happen without modifications to external organs, if the breathing system would consist of just what's now nose, you're quite correct.
It wasn't claimed specifically in this case, but every time I've heard it posited with explaination, it has been as an example of a simple thing that evolution got wrong. This is clearly not the case, and obviously so to anyone who sees it as more than the simple plumbing issue it's made out to be.
This is exceedingly unlikely to ever naturally happen, of course, but since this is pure fiction anyway, why should we feel limited by that. Same goes for the smell/taste, the new "eating mouth" could still have olfactory nerves.
The problem is, the olfactory sense uses air as a carrier which also sets the "baseline" for "no smell". In order to separate the two systems and have them work properly, we'd have to engineer some sort of mouth-like speaking apparatus in the nose, and some sort of nose-like air circulation system in the mouth. At present it's a very tightly integrated system that would require a ridiculous amount of redesign to separate, and for what? To get rid of a minor hazard like choking, which is already sufficiently mitigated by the epiglottis? It's not something that's even worth pursuing. Anyone including it in a list of things to be "corrected", either by natural selection or "forced-evolution", is totally ignoring a huge amount of systems integration and only remembering the last time they tried to eat half a cheeseburger in one bite.
Elimination of useless body parts such as toes, toenails and fingernails. The foot would work just as well with one big "toe" that spread from one side of the foot to the other without individual toes. Perhaps simply skinning over the existing digits and fusing the bones, although not to the point that the foot isn't flexible enough for normal walking.
Nails are perhaps superfluous, but toes aren't. They're integral to the "design". The forward portion of the foot is essentially a bundle of five "sticks" with articulated ends. The independent motion of the big and little toe "sticks" is what allows us to balance on one footwhile walking. It could be argued that the inside three could be fused with a very minimal loss of balance, but why?
Uhh, the vocal cords would obviously move into the breathing part, along with the rest of the organs that deal with air, why would they be in any way dependent on being along the digestive tract?
Try talking through your nose, with your mouth closed. There's more to speech than just vocal cords. The vocal cords are just a tone generator. All the real modulation is done with the tongue and mouth.
Additionally, one should note that the lion's share of work of the sense we call "taste" is done in the nose, by the olfactory nerves. So sure, let's solve that choking problem by turning humanity into a bunch of humming "mutes" who can't tell the food they're chewing is rotten. After all, choking causes more deaths than food poisoning or poor communication! [/sarcasm]
Seperation of eating and breathing functions - no more choking to death on food
This one always makes me laugh. How the fuck will we speak? Choking hazard is not such a big deal that tossing out our current method of verbal communication is a fair trade.
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Yep, this is the a classic case of trying to fight irrationality with logic. The classic example is the apocryphal story of the med student working in a psych ward trying to cure a delusional man with reason. The man was under the delusion that he was dead.
"So you're dead," says the med student.
"Yes indeed," says the man, "I've been dead for nearly ten years."
"OK then, do dead people bleed?" the med student asks.
"Don't be absurd," replies the man, "of course dead people don't bleed."
So the med student grabs the man's hand, and jabs the mans thumb with a pin, which then begins to bleed.
"Well what do you know!" exclaims the man, staring in wide-eyed amazement at the drop of blood welling up on his thumb, "Dead people do bleed!"
Looking at the picture, I guess they couldn't find an actual metric clock. It has 10 "hours" marked out, but still 60 pips for the minutes. Of course this was nearly 80 years ago and the only way to "freeze frame" was with an editing machine, so the props guys probably didn't think that level of detail was necessary...
Why is there always the presumption that a system with an x86 CPU will be PC compatible? Someone postulates that Apple may be considering using Intel CPUs, and everyone makes the giant leap of (il)logic that Apple is considering adopting the PC platform as a whole. It is entirely possible to use the same CPU in a totally incompatible system. Look at the Original 68000 based Macs. Were they compatible with the 68000 based Amiga? It is only logical to assume that were Apple to dump IBM and adopt (say) the Pentium-M as their new CPU it would be installed on a proprietary Apple motherboard, not a $40 Abit or Tyan from Taiwan.
OK genius, let's hear your super-enlightened, non-american rendition of the joke. Latin is generally the only ancient language well known enough that one can appropriate a couple word endings, apply them to modern language, and still get the point across. Yes, it would have been more accurate if he'd had Archimedes writing ancient greek, you pedantic troll, but due to lack of greek characters on our keyboards, and the fact that almost nobody would be able to read it, it would no longer be an effective joke because no one would get it.
That's why it's hard to land them on carriers...
Reminds me of the story of the first carrier landing of an F-111. After what was apparently an extremely harrowing experience landing, a journalist asked the pilot "if you had a choice between landing the F-111 or any other aircraft on a carrier, which would you choose?" The pilot said "Any other aircraft". Needless to say, consideration of the F-111 as a possible fleet defense craft was dropped.
They don't really have the capacity to perform any useful work, so their net productivity is a negative number. With 12 of them the "payback" is that negative number times 12. "I know we're selling below cost, but we make up for it in volume!"
Funny you should mention, as just last week I stripped all the interesting parts out of a Baby Pac-Man machine someone dumped in the alley behind my workplace. I don't remember ever seeing one in action, but judging by the miniscule pinball field, it looked like a pretty weak concept.
Have you never programmed a game before? All of that stuff is simple. I could knock off YAPMC in about 2 days. The part that's not trivial is doing it 25 years ago, in assembly language, within the limits of the hardware in those days.
Not only that, it's been Dilberted:
BUSINESSMAN: Wait, I've got it! All we need to do to improve profits is lower costs and increase revenues!.....AAAAAAGH! My eyes!
DILBERT: That would be from the flash of the blindingly obvious.
The menu bar gets slightly larger, but then it's still significantly smaller than the menu bar PLUS a toolbar below it. I also prefer the back-forward-reload icons above the center of the window rather than left justified. It doesn't save a huge amount of space, but at 1024x768 on my stupid slow-scrolling laptop every extra pixel counts. You actually outlined my complaint better than I did. It's not so much that I need to move the stuff-- it's that the Opera people have decided on their own that I shouldn't be able to. That's just lame.
1) everyone must buy a new DVD player.
2) only the person who purchased the DVD can play it, so forget buying DVDs as gifts or picking up the latest inane Spoogebob Squatpants for the kids-- they gots ta' buy it theyselves!
3) every DVD retailer is going to have to buy and maintain a bunch of MPAA approved RFID writer/biometric reader devices
4) WHOOPS! No way to record biometric data at home! DVD sales over the internet are impossible
5) "What do you mean, I can't sell this DVD on half.com?" Simple transfer of ownership is now IMPOSSIBLE!
Great idea, guys! People will eat it right up, I'm sure! "What? a large and onerous encumberance with no upside for me? Oh yeah, sign me up for that!" Buncha' freakin' tards...
You're probably one of those guys who thinks you can accidentally detonate a nuclear warhead by knocking it over. What, in your mind, constitutes "making a mistake with one"? Bad orbits end up with satellites burning up in the atmosphere, not indiscriminately raining fire on babies or something. Fired by accident? Fired by a software bug? Yeah, just like happens all the time with our ICBMs. I fail to see how orbit constitutes "half-fired". Care to elaborate on your bizarre assertions?
I'd love to use Opera because it's fast, but until it lets me cram the back-forward-reload icons, google box, and address box all on the same line as the "File Edit View ... Help" menus, forget it. All the other browsers let me do that.
No you can move icons. The toolbars are in a fixed order and only exist stretched from one side of the screen to the other. Now, one could call the toolbars "movable" in the sense that you can take all the icons from one and drag them to the other, but that's only true if you accept Opera's stupidly limited definition of "toolbar". The "File Edit View ... Help" bar at the top is not considered a toolbar, so all that dead space after "Help" is just that-- dead space. The address bar is not considered a toolbar, but rather an integral part of each tabbed window in the MDI. The way I have Firefox set up is with "File Edit View", back forward reload home icons, google search box, and address bar all on the top line. Let's see you do that with Opera. Back to the kids table, junior.
Interesting maybe, in a "reality TV" sort of way; but not at all reasonable. Presumably we wouldn't send out a mars mission without a shitload of tools and parts, and the craft would be designed specifically for easy on-site user maintenance. The ISS is a lot like a hotel-- if you've got any problem more serious than a light bulb out, you pretty much have to call downstairs and wait for the maintenance guy to come up with a spare part from the basement and fix it.
Yeah, there's really no telling. I was recently reading Heinlein's account of his trip to the Soviet Union back in the Bad Old Days, and there's an interesting anecdote about this very subject. He was there quite a while before Gagarin's flight, so this was pretty early on in the race. One day he's talking to a Soviet Air Force officer who boasts that the previous day's space launch was manned, and that they were the first into orbit. For a whole day, everyone was talking about how they were first into space. Then, suddenly, the official party line changed. It was only an unmanned test flight. And also, they'd lost contact with it. Nothing to see here, move along. Who knows how many of those there were, and how many were actually unmannned...
Because a mars mission will require more than just an oxygen generator. By the time you've assembled all the critical components into a testable system, you've essentially got most of a space station.
Funny you should bring that up also, as one of the other things crossbows allowed which bows didn't was all manner of mechanical contrivances, from levers to cranks and pulleys, designed to allow even the weakest noob to cock it. Like I said, you could put a crossbow in anyone's hands and they'd be able to use it with minimal instruction.
And when you see somebody cock a gun in a movie, it's almost always stupid.
Yeah, if I had a nickel for every stupid "cock the gun as a threat" scene. My favorite is when the cocking noise was obviously foleyed in later becausee some dimwit editor said "oooo, have it sound like he's cocking the gun there". Particularly amusing is when they foley in a "hammer cock" and the character is holding a bloody Glock (cough)Lost(/cough).
I think Opera should sit quietly at the kids table until it gets MOVABLE TOOLBARS.
I know of one product, a flight planning and maintenance tracking app for small aviation businesses, that's still written entirely in Pascal. They guy who wrote it has been trying to convert it to C++, but has so far been unsuccessful. It's a terrible crawling horror of a program. It is, at least, Y2K compliant.
Funny you should phrase it this way, because this is exactly the reason the crossbow was developed. Archers with regular bows required years of training, while even a particularly thickheaded soldier could be taught to use a crossbow in about a week.
It wasn't claimed specifically in this case, but every time I've heard it posited with explaination, it has been as an example of a simple thing that evolution got wrong. This is clearly not the case, and obviously so to anyone who sees it as more than the simple plumbing issue it's made out to be.
This is exceedingly unlikely to ever naturally happen, of course, but since this is pure fiction anyway, why should we feel limited by that. Same goes for the smell/taste, the new "eating mouth" could still have olfactory nerves.
The problem is, the olfactory sense uses air as a carrier which also sets the "baseline" for "no smell". In order to separate the two systems and have them work properly, we'd have to engineer some sort of mouth-like speaking apparatus in the nose, and some sort of nose-like air circulation system in the mouth. At present it's a very tightly integrated system that would require a ridiculous amount of redesign to separate, and for what? To get rid of a minor hazard like choking, which is already sufficiently mitigated by the epiglottis? It's not something that's even worth pursuing. Anyone including it in a list of things to be "corrected", either by natural selection or "forced-evolution", is totally ignoring a huge amount of systems integration and only remembering the last time they tried to eat half a cheeseburger in one bite.
Nails are perhaps superfluous, but toes aren't. They're integral to the "design". The forward portion of the foot is essentially a bundle of five "sticks" with articulated ends. The independent motion of the big and little toe "sticks" is what allows us to balance on one footwhile walking. It could be argued that the inside three could be fused with a very minimal loss of balance, but why?
Try talking through your nose, with your mouth closed. There's more to speech than just vocal cords. The vocal cords are just a tone generator. All the real modulation is done with the tongue and mouth.
Additionally, one should note that the lion's share of work of the sense we call "taste" is done in the nose, by the olfactory nerves. So sure, let's solve that choking problem by turning humanity into a bunch of humming "mutes" who can't tell the food they're chewing is rotten. After all, choking causes more deaths than food poisoning or poor communication! [/sarcasm]
This one always makes me laugh. How the fuck will we speak? Choking hazard is not such a big deal that tossing out our current method of verbal communication is a fair trade.