Dish time can be hideously expensive, and keep in mind your average home pizza dish doesn't quite cut the mustard in communicating with a small transponder millions of miles away.
For example, there are many people who would willingly donate their time and expertise to the SETI program. But for years they had to fight for funding. Why? Radio telescope time doesn't come cheap. And building your own isn't exactly feasible, either.
This summer the lady and I were visiting the aquarium in the Mall of America in Minneapolis. Downstairs is this place where you can pet small sharks and manta rays and such. We were watching them swim around, when suddenly this kid hollers out "HEY LADY! WHY ARE THOSE TWO SHARKS FIGHTING?"
The woman who worked there then proceed to explain to the youngster all about shark mating behaviour. My lady friend and I hardly made it out of there with breath left in our lungs, we laughed so hard.
(Anyone who doesn't understand, watch the whole run of the Simpsons until you hear Homer yelling "ZOOKEEPER! ZOOKEEPER! THOSE MONKEYS ARE KILLING EACH OTHER!")
When a friend and I were about 11-12, we went to this trade fair where different booths were handing out helium balloons. We must have grabbed 50 or so each. So what else do you do with 100 helium balloons? We slitted a garbage bag, made a huge black sheet of low-weight plastic, and tied the balloons to it. We also attached a note to it (hey, we were kids) to the effect of: "If you find this, call me @ xxx-xxxx".
The sucker was visible for a LONG time as it rose (very little wind that day). We promptly forgot about it, until about 6 months later. Turns out it ended up in some farmer's field about 200 miles away!
Yeah, completely offtopic, but further proof of just how geeky I was in those days. Thoughts like this are what inspires people to send probes to other planets, I guess.
I won't flame you, because I also share your opinion of "break the law, suffer the consequences". Where I do disagree is in the consequences themselves:
Imagine if the FBI had spent millions of dollars setting up dragnets on known jaywalkers around the world. These people KNOW they're breaking the law, and they've been caught red-handed. You don't have the RIGHT to jaywalk. Jail time is the only possible answer, right? And to top it all off, undercover agents secretly were telling suspects how to jaywalk, and where to jaywalk.
Puts things a little more in perspective, right?
(Note: I'm assuming that jaywalking is illegal in most jurisidictions.. if not, insert your own silly law here)
Or rather, answers in this case. You commonly hear things like 'this is hotter than the surface of the SUN!!!' like it's some huge temperature. In reality, what is considered the 'surface' of the sun is only a few thousand degress (still pretty hot, but not THAT hot). It's the extreme lower depths, and especially the upper 'atmosphere' of the sun that is hot - in the range of millions of degrees.
Maybe I'm missing my mark here, but with multipart rar archives, this new PAR feature sounds just like what you're describing. As long as you snag the correct number of files, it doesn't matter which ones you get.. you can recreate the source.
You must be kidding me. The Empire Strikes Back (episode 5 for all the kiddies) was released in 1980, and I know for a fact that the term 'asteroid field' was used in this movie. If this turns out to be the first use of this... well, it's rather freaky, don't you think? I'm as big a SW fan as anyone, but I never considered it anywhere near hard scifi!
It's really funny, the 2 broadband ISPs here (cable and DSL) are HEAVILY promoting their services this holiday season, and almost invariably with the tagline "download mp3s and full-motion video in a heartbeat" or some such.
Now, I may be naive and all, but doesn't that pretty clearly imply "buy our service and pirate the shit out of the entertainment industry"? Makes me wonder when the government will go after these guys.
I think the hair-trigger threshold that most people around here have for unleashing verbal abuse at innocuous sites whose opinion differs from theirs constitutes its own dataset about the desensitizing effects of violence on children.
Jeez --- a private site, simply listing toys that concerned parents might want to avoid this Christmas. That's all, folks!
Well that's not all though. This same organization is lobbying the US gov't to actually STOP production of these toys. No one on slashdot is advocating shutting this site down. NOW who's afraid of a different opinion?
Has it occurred to any of you that taking the time to choose toys for your children --- instead of buying whatever crap is marketed to them --- is actually evidence of being a good parent?
Yes. And to be honest, I'd much prefer a parent actually LOOK at a toy and think FOR THEMSELVES about the good/bad qualities of it. Much better than simply reading a list of someone else's opinions and taking action on that, when you don't even know if this someone else shares any of the same values that you do.
Maybe you miss the point of why so many people find this scary. It's not a differing opinion that bothers me - it's a differing opinion forced down my throat that does. And of course using a website as an excuse to be a bad parent.
And whether or not you think shielding kids from violence is right or wrong, it's NOT your decision. It's the parent's decision.
Nail on the head. However, what scares me about people like this is their inherent need to impress their views on others. Maybe some are just looking out for their own kids (of course if this is the case why can't they just go to the store and look at the toy themselves..), but far too many of them want to rant to the world about how this or that toy is BAD. Very rarely is this just to share opinions, most often it's a nice subtle way of saying "this is how YOU should raise YOUR children".
Then again, I may be biased. I grew up with oodles of everything that was claimed to be violent/pornographic/bad for kids, and I'm a hell of a lot more stable and non-violent that a lot of people out there. *shrug* Guess my parents took the time to explain reality vs. fantasy to me.
I think part of the argument here is the one major shortfall in digital cameras today: resolution. Everyone knows film has far greater resolution, and that's why (for the moment) digital cameras aren't the norm.
Now, we obviously need to improve the CCD until we can squeeze billions and trillions of pixels first, but the limiting factor beyond that is gonna be storage space. A little 16MB cf card doesn't exactly cut it when you're talking 8,000x8,000 images. 3-D memory will (in theory) allow such great density that a camera could contain gigabytes or more of memory. Assuming the rest of the hardware advances continue, THIS is the only way we'll ever replace film fully.
Actually, "I'll be back" is considered Arnie's signature one-liner. Watch enough of his movies and you'll realize just how often he says it. The earliest I can think of (besides Terminator 1) is The Running Man (1985?).
You know, Lucas signed the Darth Vader helmet (which took approximately 3 seconds of his time), and suddenly it's worth hundreds of dollars more.
Reminds me of the 'old' adage about Bill Gates: that if while on the way to work in the morning, he stopped to pick up a $100 bill lying on the sidewalk. He'd actually LOSE money, because he makes more in those few seconds than the bill is worth. As to why he's walking to work in the first place...
I kid you not, they've released a retro/classic version of football, THIS YEAR. I saw it in a wal-mart or toys r us catalog a couple of weeks ago. Was less than $20 too:)
..and ever since then, we have a EUROPEAN head of state, a EUROPEAN leader on our currency, and are for many purposes considered just a colony of the UK.:)
What's ironic here is not only that this gets modded up to "interesting", when it's basically the same comment that's made every single/. story on some form of new tech. What's really ironic is that in 1984, document forgery was carried out on... wait for it... PAPER!
Re:E-Paper could bring about social injustice
on
Electronic Paper
·
· Score: 2
And if books ever became a standard, only people with money and access to stores/libraries would be able to read. Poor people can't afford even the bus ticket to the library (or so activists try to claim in my city).
Guess what? The poor are very rarely that poor that they have *nothing*. E-paper becoming standard sort of implies that it will also become exceedingly cheap. No reason why a person couldn't "check out" an e-book from the library just as easily as they could a dead tree version.
Then again, blaming the technology and not the implementation is one way to ensure that the sky is always falling...
That atrocious little chart of consoles surprisingly included the original Odyssey! Ah, the days before video games used microchips. I'm surprised that mine doesn't have 'SOLID STATE' proudly stamped on the case somewhere.
On another note,
Indeed, no one had seen the like done before with 256 colors, 320 by 200 display, and a hopping 66 MHz 486 with 4 megabytes of RAM
Funny, I don't remember many people with a 486-66 back then. The BIG deal about Doom was that you DIDN'T need the newest and best PC to run it. Low end 386's did it just fine, if you didn't mind a reduced screen size.
AMD released a new chip today that runs 5% faster than their old chips. It sells for 2x the price of the next fastest chip.
I dunno, something that has twice the storage for half the price (well almost)... works out to be 4x the deal by my math (if these are the stats you care about, like I do). Compared to the much-touted ipod, I'd say this is one hell of an accomplishment.
Let's see regular 4x performance increased in CPU power for the same cost, and then I may agree with you. Until then, your point makes little sense.
Before I stopped purchasing music (read: new stuff sucking), I had amassed over 300 cd's alone. This was on top of the 200 or so cassettes that I owned, bought before I owned a CD player, and very few of these duplicated each other. I stopped buying music around age 23 or so. At that point I 'owned' over 5000 songs alone (500 albums * 10 songs average per).
If I were to have continued to purchase music, with the money I have these days, I'd be well over 10,000 songs. And I'm damn picky in terms of what I like. If 3,000 songs seems like a lot, you have very, very select tastes in music, or not much money.
How old were you when you started regularly smoking?
About 13, but that was the old 3-4 (if that) cigarettes a day that all teenagers start with. I usually count from 16ish, it was right around 1st year that caffeine and nicotine became my best friends:) I'll stop talking now, before this gets even more offtopic..
Oh, and to everyone who thinks this isn't a real problem, good for you. It just means you haven't been bit yet. Good luck ignoring the problem though
You have to hand it to modern psychologists/psychiatrists and our victim-based society: we sure are convinced that everything else is the problem these days. Not addicted to booze yet? You will be. Never spent your life savings gambling? You will soon. These evils are SO powerful and SO irresistable, that no matter how smart, how responsible, how lucky you are, in the end, they will get you too.
Or is it the easy transfer of blame factor that works so often in 'addictions'?
(For the record, this is coming from a 10-year pack-a-day smoker who just quit 5 months ago. I just stopped one day, because I decided that I didn't want to smoke anymore. And in 5 months I reallY haven't wanted to since.)
Don't forget, he could also write ~7K or so about how all of the cool software up there was windows based, so he couldn't use it on the machines he plays windows-only games on.
Slashdot Mirror
For example, there are many people who would willingly donate their time and expertise to the SETI program. But for years they had to fight for funding. Why? Radio telescope time doesn't come cheap. And building your own isn't exactly feasible, either.
The woman who worked there then proceed to explain to the youngster all about shark mating behaviour. My lady friend and I hardly made it out of there with breath left in our lungs, we laughed so hard.
(Anyone who doesn't understand, watch the whole run of the Simpsons until you hear Homer yelling "ZOOKEEPER! ZOOKEEPER! THOSE MONKEYS ARE KILLING EACH OTHER!")
The sucker was visible for a LONG time as it rose (very little wind that day). We promptly forgot about it, until about 6 months later. Turns out it ended up in some farmer's field about 200 miles away!
Yeah, completely offtopic, but further proof of just how geeky I was in those days. Thoughts like this are what inspires people to send probes to other planets, I guess.
Imagine if the FBI had spent millions of dollars setting up dragnets on known jaywalkers around the world. These people KNOW they're breaking the law, and they've been caught red-handed. You don't have the RIGHT to jaywalk. Jail time is the only possible answer, right? And to top it all off, undercover agents secretly were telling suspects how to jaywalk, and where to jaywalk.
Puts things a little more in perspective, right?
(Note: I'm assuming that jaywalking is illegal in most jurisidictions.. if not, insert your own silly law here)
Or am I completely off my rocker here?
You must be kidding me. The Empire Strikes Back (episode 5 for all the kiddies) was released in 1980, and I know for a fact that the term 'asteroid field' was used in this movie. If this turns out to be the first use of this... well, it's rather freaky, don't you think? I'm as big a SW fan as anyone, but I never considered it anywhere near hard scifi!
Now, I may be naive and all, but doesn't that pretty clearly imply "buy our service and pirate the shit out of the entertainment industry"? Makes me wonder when the government will go after these guys.
I think the hair-trigger threshold that most people around here have for unleashing verbal abuse at innocuous sites whose opinion differs from theirs constitutes its own dataset about the desensitizing effects of violence on children.
Jeez --- a private site, simply listing toys that concerned parents might want to avoid this Christmas. That's all, folks!
Well that's not all though. This same organization is lobbying the US gov't to actually STOP production of these toys. No one on slashdot is advocating shutting this site down. NOW who's afraid of a different opinion?
Has it occurred to any of you that taking the time to choose toys for your children --- instead of buying whatever crap is marketed to them --- is actually evidence of being a good parent?
Yes. And to be honest, I'd much prefer a parent actually LOOK at a toy and think FOR THEMSELVES about the good/bad qualities of it. Much better than simply reading a list of someone else's opinions and taking action on that, when you don't even know if this someone else shares any of the same values that you do.
Maybe you miss the point of why so many people find this scary. It's not a differing opinion that bothers me - it's a differing opinion forced down my throat that does. And of course using a website as an excuse to be a bad parent.
Nail on the head. However, what scares me about people like this is their inherent need to impress their views on others. Maybe some are just looking out for their own kids (of course if this is the case why can't they just go to the store and look at the toy themselves..), but far too many of them want to rant to the world about how this or that toy is BAD. Very rarely is this just to share opinions, most often it's a nice subtle way of saying "this is how YOU should raise YOUR children".
Then again, I may be biased. I grew up with oodles of everything that was claimed to be violent/pornographic/bad for kids, and I'm a hell of a lot more stable and non-violent that a lot of people out there. *shrug* Guess my parents took the time to explain reality vs. fantasy to me.
Now, we obviously need to improve the CCD until we can squeeze billions and trillions of pixels first, but the limiting factor beyond that is gonna be storage space. A little 16MB cf card doesn't exactly cut it when you're talking 8,000x8,000 images. 3-D memory will (in theory) allow such great density that a camera could contain gigabytes or more of memory. Assuming the rest of the hardware advances continue, THIS is the only way we'll ever replace film fully.
Actually, "I'll be back" is considered Arnie's signature one-liner. Watch enough of his movies and you'll realize just how often he says it. The earliest I can think of (besides Terminator 1) is The Running Man (1985?).
Alien: Abortions for everyone
Crowd: BOOOOOOOOOO!!!
Alien: OK, Abortions for no one
Crowd: BOOOOOOOOOO!!!
Alien: OK, Abortions for some, miniature american flags for all
Crowd: YAAAAAAYYYY!!!
Reminds me of the 'old' adage about Bill Gates: that if while on the way to work in the morning, he stopped to pick up a $100 bill lying on the sidewalk. He'd actually LOSE money, because he makes more in those few seconds than the bill is worth. As to why he's walking to work in the first place...
Guess what? The poor are very rarely that poor that they have *nothing*. E-paper becoming standard sort of implies that it will also become exceedingly cheap. No reason why a person couldn't "check out" an e-book from the library just as easily as they could a dead tree version.
Then again, blaming the technology and not the implementation is one way to ensure that the sky is always falling...
On another note,
Funny, I don't remember many people with a 486-66 back then. The BIG deal about Doom was that you DIDN'T need the newest and best PC to run it. Low end 386's did it just fine, if you didn't mind a reduced screen size.
I dunno, something that has twice the storage for half the price (well almost)
Let's see regular 4x performance increased in CPU power for the same cost, and then I may agree with you. Until then, your point makes little sense.
If I were to have continued to purchase music, with the money I have these days, I'd be well over 10,000 songs. And I'm damn picky in terms of what I like. If 3,000 songs seems like a lot, you have very, very select tastes in music, or not much money.
About 13, but that was the old 3-4 (if that) cigarettes a day that all teenagers start with. I usually count from 16ish, it was right around 1st year that caffeine and nicotine became my best friends
You have to hand it to modern psychologists/psychiatrists and our victim-based society: we sure are convinced that everything else is the problem these days. Not addicted to booze yet? You will be. Never spent your life savings gambling? You will soon. These evils are SO powerful and SO irresistable, that no matter how smart, how responsible, how lucky you are, in the end, they will get you too.
Or is it the easy transfer of blame factor that works so often in 'addictions'?
(For the record, this is coming from a 10-year pack-a-day smoker who just quit 5 months ago. I just stopped one day, because I decided that I didn't want to smoke anymore. And in 5 months I reallY haven't wanted to since.)