I dont buy this for a second. Removal of fine, electro-statically dust, has been practiced on this planet for centuries if not millenia. There are entire industries[windex.com] based on this practice. I am convinced that it was one of those famous NASA managerial pissing contests that ensured no "feasible" or "practical" solution. Read: the companies which proposed the solutions were not part of the "in" crowd.
The key difference you're missing is, in your own words, "on this planet". The fact that the rovers are on mars has two important effects. First, the atmospheric composition, weather conditions, and the nature of the martian dust itself render common dust abatement methods here on earth ineffective. The most common, spraying liquid and wiping, is totally out of the question when the temperature is -20 to -80 degrees C. Second, the inaccessability of a rover on mars means that complex mechanical "wiping" solutions are out of the question-- there's no one there to smack the side of the unit when a cam arm gets stuck, or replace a solar panel when a wiper blade gouges it with a sharp pebble.
If you're so sure there's an easy solution, let's hear it. Your bizarre conspiracy theory makes no sense.
For more information on UK pedestrian crossings, go here
It's so much more exciting than just a 'walk' sign...
Clearly this was all designed as a big joke, right? Some sort of devilish amusement for someone who wanted to throw both pedestrians AND motorists into confusion? Spinning cones for the blind? "Zebra" panic zones wherein cars must slam on their brakes if a pedestrian so much as touches his toe to the street and sets off a strobe? Yargh...
So basically, what you are saying is that if I find 100 other people with yellow penguins and walk around town with them, then it's suddenly okay and acceptable?
Yes. Hang out with a bunch of drama majors at your local college and you'll see much weirder things than carrying yellow penguins.
From the inside of this group, it sure looks okay. I mean, from the inside it appears that everyone is doing it. However, if an outsider takes a look at this sort of behaviour ( 101 people walking around with yellow penguins while said penguins beat eachother up and shock eachother with tazers ) they'd get worried and sooner or later, all 101 of us would end up in the local funny farm.
Actually, what you've described is nowhere near as bizarre as the actions of some Society for Creative Anachronism groups. Nobody thinks twice about an SCA meeting and they mostly hit each other with rattan sticks and speak in Olde English.
Now apply this to a bunch of people who ARE their respective RP characters. From the inside it looks perfectly normal; Everyone else is doing it so it's probably okay, right? From an outside perspective, it's still scary as hell to see people going that far for something as simple as a game.
What you're missing is that it's all about context. Walking around in public trying to get non role players to interacts with your role playing is bizarre. Walking around a group of role players (real or virtual) and role playing with them isn't even unusual. You might think that some people overreact when something bad happens to their fictional character, but that's because the fictional character means nothing to you. Example: If one spent months tranferring all one's old Dr. Who episodes from video tape to MPEG captures, but then lost them when the drive crashed, one would likely be quite distressed. To an observer who doesn't care about Dr. Who and thinks also that videotape is an adequate medium, your reaction is totally bizarre. To him, you were wasting your time on a pointless project anyway, so why should you care so much when you lose evrything? Point is, you can't objectively measure the value of someone else's entertainment.
If I walk around in my town, carrying about a penguin that's been painted yellow and while trying to make everyone call said penguin "Pikachu", I'll be comitted to the local looney bin. How is that any different from romping about an imaginary town called "Darkhaven" and insisting that you're not John Doe, but "Thorpe the Ranger"?
The better real-world equivalent of insisting you're "Thorpe the Ranger" isn't walking around town at random with a penguin, it's more like walking around a raised platform claiming to be the King of Denmark while others on the same platform pretend to be Polonius, Ophelia, Hamlet, etc. Nobody watching this spectacle should find any of those actions odd. Role-playing is very, very old. The only difference is the medium.
I read an editorial commentary one a web site (I can't remember where, and I can no longer find it) discussing the demise of adventure games. One reason cited was the use of irrational puzzles. The author went on to describe one such puzzle in detail (I quote from memory, so it's just an approximation):
You must get into a secret base, but you need an ID Pass. You get a soldier drunk and steal his pass. Next, you find a pen and draw a mustache on his picture on the ID. Then you go out back to the shed, put a piece of masking tape over a small hole in the back of the shed. You then chase a
black cat into the shed, who then runs out the hole in the back. The masking tape catches some of the cat's hair as it brushes past it. You then take the hair from the tape, find the bottle of spirit gum in the hotel manager's desk, and use the cat hair to make a fake mustache. The problem with the puzzle is that it's illogical. Everybody knows that the first step in impersonating a man without a mustache is to not make a fake mustache. Even after making the leap to the mustache, the method of making it is totally bizarre and non-intuitive. The worst part is that getting into the base is a bottleneck in the game. Unless you can figure out the "stupid cat trick", you can't continue. Bad design like this was a nail in the coffin.
Sorry, thought it was clear. My point was that pointing out the unconscionable action of JF does not make one an apologist for US policy.
punctuated with a bunch of vicious name calling like:
"Shut your pie-hole, fuckwit"
(shrug) I have a particular disdain for AC posters who say "If you were really an American patriot you wouldn't blindly support the proposition that its OK for the U.S. to kill anyone it feels like, whenever it feels like it" when the person to whom they are replying said not one word in support of the US government position in Vietnam. Knee-jerk politicos bug me. I don't mind the "US == bad" stuff; hell, I agree with 99.9% of it. I just get annoyed with the unilateral belief in "anti-US == good". Bad people are bad, even if they're fighting other bad people.
My main point is Fonda might have gone overboard but there was at least some validity to some of the argument she was trying to make.
The validity of her point has no bearing upon the defensibility of her actions. Encouraging war is uncool no matter which side you decided is "better".
There isn't much you can defend about the action of the the U.S. Government during that period and she showed some guts in giving the U.S. government the finger for it instead of meekly waving the flag and cheering them on.
Guts? Giving the government the finger? Who gives a crap? While I applaud her assisting the efforts to end the war in the US, encouraging the north vietnamese to kill US draftees because one opposes the policy of the US Government is the act of a ignorant, self-righteous dolt. If you're looking for real protest heroes, try Daniel Berrigan, Quang Duc, and Rev James Lawson.
Um, it's my understanding that story is bullshit. -1 Troll plz.
It is. It was a copy-paste error on my part. Note my correction, posted below my original post, came as soon as the 2-minute timer would allow. My fault. Didn't preview.
But for you to say that anyone that's rich is a 'sell out'
is a crock of shit. I value money, yes, but only money that
I've earned. Where you would disagree is in what we call work.
Oh, I'd never say that rich people don't work. Making money takes a LOT of work. I've never met a rich person who didn't work 60-80 hours a week. My "sell out" comment was kinda meant to be funny-- just trying to illustrate things in a way that the commie-pinkos could understand.:) I was mostly trying to illustrate that rich people are as motivated by money as anyone else.
I hate to break it to you both sides in wars commit atrocities like torturing prisoners.
*whooooosh!*
You missed my point entirely. I didn't defend US actions, nor would I ever be inclined to do so. I pointed out that Jane Fonda was mindlessly defending a bunch of brutal scum solely because of her dislike for the other brutal scum they happened to be fighting against. I don't much care for simplistic "enemy of my enemy is my friend, particularly if they say they're anti-US" posturing.
Ah, evidently the albinoblacksheep guys have never heard of the battle of Austerlitz,
Part of the Napoleonic wars, which France lost in the end.
the battle of the Pyrimids
also part of the Napoleonic wars...
or the battle of Verdun
With 143 000 Germans and 163 000 French killed, sounds like they were losing. Or, as the site put it: "Tied and on the way to losing, France is saved by the United States."
I think the site is about France not winning wars, rather than battles.
I inadvertently blockquoted the one aspect of the story about Jane Fonda in Vietnam that's provably untrue (stupid homebrew clipboard app). What SHOULD have been pasted there follows:
To add insult to injury, when American POWs finally began to return home (some of them having been held captive for up to nine years) and describe the tortures they had endured at the hands of the North Vietnamese, Jane Fonda quickly told the country that they should "not hail the POWs as heroes, because they are hypocrites and liars." Fonda said the idea that the POWs she had met in Vietnam had been tortured was "laughable," claiming: "These were not men who had been tortured. These were not men who had been starved. These were not men who had been brainwashed." The POWs who said they had been tortured were "exaggerating, probably for their own self-interest," she asserted. She told audiences that "Never in the history of the United States have POWs come home looking like football players. These football players are no more heroes than Custer was. They're military careerists and professional killers" who are "trying to make themselves look self-righteous, but they are war criminals according to law."
Fonda's actions may have been a little over the top in going to North Vietnam but she didn't wage an illegal war that killed millions including 50,000 Americans while the U.S. government did. I think I would take Fonda over LBJ, McNamara, Nixon and Kissinger any day.
If you were really an American patriot you wouldn't blindly support the proposition that its OK for the U.S. to kill anyone it feels like, whenever it feels like it.
Shut your pie-hole, fuckwit. Somebody asked what the big deal about Jane Fonda was, and he explained. He didn't voice a single word of support for the vietnam war, he just said it Fonda's actions were despicable. An opinion against Fonda is only that-- an opinion against Fonda. Personally, I think the Vietnam war war a load of crap like you do, but I also think Jane Fonda was a pig-headed lefty idealist moron (perhaps she still is-- she's at least less obvious now). One doesn't have to be a warmonger to find her actions disgusting. Quote:
"They, however, had time and devised a plan to get word to the world that they still survived. Each man secreted a tiny piece of paper, with his Social Security number on it, in the palm of his hand. When paraded before Ms. Fonda and a cameraman, she walked the line, shaking each man's hand and asking little encouraging snippets like, 'Aren't you sorry you bombed babies?' and, 'Are you grateful for the humane treatment from your benevolent captors?'"
"Believing this HAD to be an act, they each palmed her their sliver of paper. She took them all without missing a beat. At the end of the line and once the camera stopped rolling, to the shocked disbelief of the POWs, she turned to the officer in charge... and handed him the little pile of notes.
"Three men died from the subsequent beatings. Col. Carrigan was almost number four.
Jane Fonda is a pile of crap no better than the piles of crap that are/were Johnson, McNamara, Nixon, Kissinger, etc.
Actually, it is a crime under the DMCA, section 1202. There was an article on this very issue on groklaw.net. All they need to do is say that a watermark is copyright management information.
Not carefully the following words in the statute:
"intentionally...knowing...having reasonable grounds to know..."
Section 1202 leans heavily upon the perpetrator knowing the copyright information is being removed. Tough row to hoe with watermarks, being that they're hidden.
The other part of the DMCA says stripping copyright information or other identifying marks from a copyrighted work in an attempt to avoid proper attribution is also a violation.
They'd really have to show intent to get a conviction there, as the woatermark (by its nature) is essentially invisible. Likewise, a company cannot shrink a bunch of company secrets down to a microdot, put a copy of the microdot inside every pen in the supply closet, and then take every slob who walks off with a Bic Medium Point Black and charge them with corporate espionage. The removal of copyright information provision is there to punish those who intentionally remove it so as to obfuscate their crime.
That wasn't quite the version that became law, however.It's a close cousin but the Senate version of the bill was thrown out and the House version was the one that came back from the conference comittee and was appoved by voice vote.
The fact that he voted "yea" on the Senate version is enough to show that he was in favor of the basic premise. The fact that a couple more senators anonymously abstained later doesn't change that.
BTW how Rich is Bush? Being from one of the elite families in the US you'd think he would be swimming in money. After all wasn't his grandfather or great grandfather one of founders of the CIA or something.
What? You speak as if the CIA is a company and the Bush family has stock in it. It's a government agency, you knob. It was formed in 1947 by Harry Truman. GW Bush was the head of the CIA for a while, but he was rich before that.
i don't want a president who identifies with "common folk". hell, i'm a school teacher. i want a person larger than life, a lincoln, a roosevelt, a reagan. i wnat a someone who is a leader, who is visionary.
Lincoln didn't identify with the common folk? What Lincoln are you talking about? The man grew up in a log cabin fer cripes sake! His defining characteristic personality-wise was his down-to-earth folksy charm.
for one actually would rather have a rich politician only in that can't be "bought". at least the rich will more often than not vote their conscience.
You're kidding, right? Rich people are rich because they place a high value on money. They've already shown their willingness to "sell out" by amassing large sums of cash. Unless you're talking about those who inherit their money [cough]kennedy[/cough], in which case they tend to be aristocratic and paternalistic because they fancy themselves "champions of the common man". Never mind the fact that they've no idea what it means to be "the common man"...
Anyone who pretends an Aeron is a pointless extravagance and that a Hummer is really cool cannot be over 16 yrs old, have an IQ above 70, AND be serious.
I suspect he was continuing the "saying Aerons are dumb to keep auction price down" joke, but turning it around to say "forget the Hummer, bid on the CHAIRS". Re-read the post. Jokes, people, they're just jokes.
and for AMD's sake I hope they add a fs*ckin thermistor to their procs so if the heat sink is loose they don't smoke themselves... (fsckin unacceptable).
AMD processors since the Barton core Athlon XP have had an on-die thermistor.
Add another $3 if I had long distance on the line even if I never used it.
My favorite was when the local provider charged a monthly "long distance connection fee"-- basically a fee for them to route calls to my long distance provider. When I dropped all long distance service from my line, the next bill I got had what amounted to a "not having a long distance provider to charge you for access to fee". Just can't win.
Slashdot Mirror
The key difference you're missing is, in your own words, "on this planet". The fact that the rovers are on mars has two important effects. First, the atmospheric composition, weather conditions, and the nature of the martian dust itself render common dust abatement methods here on earth ineffective. The most common, spraying liquid and wiping, is totally out of the question when the temperature is -20 to -80 degrees C. Second, the inaccessability of a rover on mars means that complex mechanical "wiping" solutions are out of the question-- there's no one there to smack the side of the unit when a cam arm gets stuck, or replace a solar panel when a wiper blade gouges it with a sharp pebble.
If you're so sure there's an easy solution, let's hear it. Your bizarre conspiracy theory makes no sense.
Clearly this was all designed as a big joke, right? Some sort of devilish amusement for someone who wanted to throw both pedestrians AND motorists into confusion? Spinning cones for the blind? "Zebra" panic zones wherein cars must slam on their brakes if a pedestrian so much as touches his toe to the street and sets off a strobe? Yargh...
Yes. Hang out with a bunch of drama majors at your local college and you'll see much weirder things than carrying yellow penguins.
From the inside of this group, it sure looks okay. I mean, from the inside it appears that everyone is doing it. However, if an outsider takes a look at this sort of behaviour ( 101 people walking around with yellow penguins while said penguins beat eachother up and shock eachother with tazers ) they'd get worried and sooner or later, all 101 of us would end up in the local funny farm.
Actually, what you've described is nowhere near as bizarre as the actions of some Society for Creative Anachronism groups. Nobody thinks twice about an SCA meeting and they mostly hit each other with rattan sticks and speak in Olde English.
Now apply this to a bunch of people who ARE their respective RP characters. From the inside it looks perfectly normal; Everyone else is doing it so it's probably okay, right? From an outside perspective, it's still scary as hell to see people going that far for something as simple as a game.
What you're missing is that it's all about context. Walking around in public trying to get non role players to interacts with your role playing is bizarre. Walking around a group of role players (real or virtual) and role playing with them isn't even unusual. You might think that some people overreact when something bad happens to their fictional character, but that's because the fictional character means nothing to you. Example: If one spent months tranferring all one's old Dr. Who episodes from video tape to MPEG captures, but then lost them when the drive crashed, one would likely be quite distressed. To an observer who doesn't care about Dr. Who and thinks also that videotape is an adequate medium, your reaction is totally bizarre. To him, you were wasting your time on a pointless project anyway, so why should you care so much when you lose evrything? Point is, you can't objectively measure the value of someone else's entertainment.
The better real-world equivalent of insisting you're "Thorpe the Ranger" isn't walking around town at random with a penguin, it's more like walking around a raised platform claiming to be the King of Denmark while others on the same platform pretend to be Polonius, Ophelia, Hamlet, etc. Nobody watching this spectacle should find any of those actions odd. Role-playing is very, very old. The only difference is the medium.
Tobacco isn't the worst. It hardly even rates, compared to alcohol. Alcohol is much worse.
I bet LSD caused some problems.
You'd lose that bet. I suspect you're referring to the "LSD causes chromosome damage" myth. It doesn't.
No legal drugs (prescriptions), who knows?
Numerous prescription drugs can cause birth defects-- propecia, accutane, ambien, to name a few-- and it's well known.
Sorry, thought it was clear. My point was that pointing out the unconscionable action of JF does not make one an apologist for US policy.
punctuated with a bunch of vicious name calling like: "Shut your pie-hole, fuckwit"
(shrug) I have a particular disdain for AC posters who say "If you were really an American patriot you wouldn't blindly support the proposition that its OK for the U.S. to kill anyone it feels like, whenever it feels like it" when the person to whom they are replying said not one word in support of the US government position in Vietnam. Knee-jerk politicos bug me. I don't mind the "US == bad" stuff; hell, I agree with 99.9% of it. I just get annoyed with the unilateral belief in "anti-US == good". Bad people are bad, even if they're fighting other bad people.
My main point is Fonda might have gone overboard but there was at least some validity to some of the argument she was trying to make.
The validity of her point has no bearing upon the defensibility of her actions. Encouraging war is uncool no matter which side you decided is "better".
There isn't much you can defend about the action of the the U.S. Government during that period and she showed some guts in giving the U.S. government the finger for it instead of meekly waving the flag and cheering them on.
Guts? Giving the government the finger? Who gives a crap? While I applaud her assisting the efforts to end the war in the US, encouraging the north vietnamese to kill US draftees because one opposes the policy of the US Government is the act of a ignorant, self-righteous dolt. If you're looking for real protest heroes, try Daniel Berrigan, Quang Duc, and Rev James Lawson.
It is. It was a copy-paste error on my part. Note my correction, posted below my original post, came as soon as the 2-minute timer would allow. My fault. Didn't preview.
Oh, I'd never say that rich people don't work. Making money takes a LOT of work. I've never met a rich person who didn't work 60-80 hours a week. My "sell out" comment was kinda meant to be funny-- just trying to illustrate things in a way that the commie-pinkos could understand. :) I was mostly trying to illustrate that rich people are as motivated by money as anyone else.
Ahem, thats GHW Bush. Don't get your Bush's confused (always good advice).
Good point. I keep forgetting the difference between the two... ;)
*whooooosh!*
You missed my point entirely. I didn't defend US actions, nor would I ever be inclined to do so. I pointed out that Jane Fonda was mindlessly defending a bunch of brutal scum solely because of her dislike for the other brutal scum they happened to be fighting against. I don't much care for simplistic "enemy of my enemy is my friend, particularly if they say they're anti-US" posturing.
Part of the Napoleonic wars, which France lost in the end.
the battle of the Pyrimids
also part of the Napoleonic wars...
or the battle of Verdun
With 143 000 Germans and 163 000 French killed, sounds like they were losing. Or, as the site put it: "Tied and on the way to losing, France is saved by the United States."
I think the site is about France not winning wars, rather than battles.
I looked at that picture and I imagined that, instead of bringing up a Google search, it summons a Goon squad to beat the crap out of that student.
Don't forget Kissinger! The filthy bastard...
Shut your pie-hole, fuckwit. Somebody asked what the big deal about Jane Fonda was, and he explained. He didn't voice a single word of support for the vietnam war, he just said it Fonda's actions were despicable. An opinion against Fonda is only that-- an opinion against Fonda. Personally, I think the Vietnam war war a load of crap like you do, but I also think Jane Fonda was a pig-headed lefty idealist moron (perhaps she still is-- she's at least less obvious now). One doesn't have to be a warmonger to find her actions disgusting. Quote:
Jane Fonda is a pile of crap no better than the piles of crap that are/were Johnson, McNamara, Nixon, Kissinger, etc.Not carefully the following words in the statute:
"intentionally...knowing...having reasonable grounds to know..."
Section 1202 leans heavily upon the perpetrator knowing the copyright information is being removed. Tough row to hoe with watermarks, being that they're hidden.
They'd really have to show intent to get a conviction there, as the woatermark (by its nature) is essentially invisible. Likewise, a company cannot shrink a bunch of company secrets down to a microdot, put a copy of the microdot inside every pen in the supply closet, and then take every slob who walks off with a Bic Medium Point Black and charge them with corporate espionage. The removal of copyright information provision is there to punish those who intentionally remove it so as to obfuscate their crime.
The fact that he voted "yea" on the Senate version is enough to show that he was in favor of the basic premise. The fact that a couple more senators anonymously abstained later doesn't change that.
What? You speak as if the CIA is a company and the Bush family has stock in it. It's a government agency, you knob. It was formed in 1947 by Harry Truman. GW Bush was the head of the CIA for a while, but he was rich before that.
Lincoln didn't identify with the common folk? What Lincoln are you talking about? The man grew up in a log cabin fer cripes sake! His defining characteristic personality-wise was his down-to-earth folksy charm.
You're kidding, right? Rich people are rich because they place a high value on money. They've already shown their willingness to "sell out" by amassing large sums of cash. Unless you're talking about those who inherit their money [cough]kennedy[/cough], in which case they tend to be aristocratic and paternalistic because they fancy themselves "champions of the common man". Never mind the fact that they've no idea what it means to be "the common man"...
vote their conscience? [boggle]
I suspect he was continuing the "saying Aerons are dumb to keep auction price down" joke, but turning it around to say "forget the Hummer, bid on the CHAIRS". Re-read the post.
Jokes, people, they're just jokes.
AMD processors since the Barton core Athlon XP have had an on-die thermistor.
My favorite was when the local provider charged a monthly "long distance connection fee"-- basically a fee for them to route calls to my long distance provider. When I dropped all long distance service from my line, the next bill I got had what amounted to a "not having a long distance provider to charge you for access to fee". Just can't win.