Why? Well, seeing as this is only the second civilian/paying customer/whatever to go into space in the history of human space exploration, I'd say it's pretty important.
Isn't the eventual goal to have "average Joes" go to space?
Yes, and considering NO average Joes will go until a LOT of rich folks do (think cars, airplanes, etc, etc, etc)... I'd say it is NOT going to happen overnight.
The woman who put a FRESH cup of HOT coffee in her lap, then drove away.. and sucessfully sued McDonalds (check their coffee cups now, they have a warning "contents hot". no shit, sherlock). Yes, the award went way down, but the fact that this ever went anywhere in the first place...
Howabout the countless claims made every year by (puts on asbestos suit) women who wear high heels and then slip on icy surfaces? Up here in Canada, I'm sorry, but you have to be a complete moron to try spike heels outdoors in January. The claimant usually wins these, by the way.
But just to keep this on topic, am I the only one who thinks that news organizations should be required by law to insert one simple sentence into their stories: "DO NOT OPEN EMAIL ATTACHMENTS". Oh wait, then they wouldn't have a story for next time this happened.
Besides the fact that you just aligned some vague concepts with some more vague concepts, without explaining yourself, there's really nothing scary here at all. The term 'strikes back' is a common english idiom, and was rather natural for CNN et al to use.
However, just for the record, 'rebels' never drove around in landspeeders, and Luke was neither a suicidal pilot, nor was he attacking a weapon capable of blowing up planets...
Ben Kenobi / Osama? When did 'gentle Ben' ever advocate killing millions of innocent Empire civilians? Star Wars episode 4.5: Ben Gets Pissed?
Are they going to cast the twins as two hot 20 year olds that are supposed to be 8?
Well, the Olsen twins managed to play a child of about 4 years old well into their early teen years. Although how they plan on making one of them male is beyond me (not that any self-respecting geek would care, c'mon, these are the OLSEN TWINS!).
Except for the fact that at one point, Nintendo was the Microsoft of the videogame world, your post might actually make sense. Of course, touting Quicktime as the best media format/player shows your complete disconnection with reality..
If you have already purchased (or have been given) an Xbox or a PS2, simply bring it outside of a video game store, with a sledgehammer, and tell everyone how boring, crappy, and slow the system is, and how you are not going to give Bill Gates any more of your money. Then smash it to fucking bits.
Just so you know, Bill Gates doesn't make a cent off of SONY'S PS2. Not one.
NASA found planets years ago. Now, through spectral anaylysis, they have sodium. Big deal.
Yes, and IBM made PCs years ago. Now, they're faster/run different operating systems/come in translucent cases. Big deal.
Then again, I never *have* understood the point of posting a message that basically says "your site sucks". If you don't like it, please leave. Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.
No one ever seems to figure this out (and I've seen many a story on/. about the ownership of the moon). Whoever owns the moon, like ANY COUNTRY ON EARTH, is whoever can firstly occupy it, and secondly, defend it.
If some mining company sets up shop there, we can whine all we want, but unless the US/Russia/China/UN/whoever can either a)stop the mining operation through force on the moon itself, or b)stop those in charge here on Earth... well, ownership suddenly amounts to squat.
Of course, for an Earth-run mining operation it should be easy enough to arrest those responsible, if we want to ignore the complete lack of laws in the matter.
What'll be more interesting is if someone manages to set up a self-sustaining lunar colony. Guess what? That person(s) would completely own the moon, carte blanche. Unless of course we were willing to nuke them off the surface of the moon, or fight some sort of inter-planetary war. Otherwise, seeing as there's nothing that can be done about it.. they own it by defauly. That's pretty much how countries exist on Earth, anyway.
Re:we never landed on the moon (offtopic)
on
Mining On The Moon
·
· Score: 2
just out of curiosity, how many people are pro-moon/anti-moon?
To find out, take the number of Americans who live in trailer parks with a cross-section of those who think that Vince McMahon is god. That's your anti-moon people.
The rest of humanity (or at least those capable of high school physics) would be the pro-moon people.
Some people not knowledgeable enough to know the difference could be tricked into giving away their SSN, name, home address... everything somebody needs to make credit cards out of them.
I'm not quite sure what the point of your post was, but assuming you think that online voting is a bad thing because of the above... well sir/ma'am, I guess we should outlaw telephones, too. They've been used countless times to defraud people who should know better into giving up personal information.
Then again, these days ignorance IS a legitimate excuse for stupidity. Sigh...
...the fact that moving at speeds approaching the speed of light will cause you to move faster through time, so that if you left Earth, travelled at near light speeds, and then came back shortly afterwards, 100 years might have elapsed on Earth in what you perceived as about 10 minutes.
The problem is, and of course the word 'relativity' is supposed to clue you in to this, is that the Earth is also moving away from you at near light speeds. So, 100 years might elapse for you while on Earth they only perceive 10 minutes.
However, in day of the triffids, the meteor shower was presumedly caused by the breakup of some military satellite. The satellite's intended purpose was to use some form of radiation to blind selected populations; its accidental fiery demise resulted in this happening all over the world.
You know, it's precisely this sort of thing that makes me not give a shit whether what I'm doing is piracy or not. This year alone I've spent over $1,000 on textbooks, for which roughly I'll be using 20% of the material inside. The professors can't just provide us with the relevant chapters, and so basically I'm forced to buy 4x more than what I really want.
The same issue with CDs: for years I've hated to buy an album just for one or two songs. I could say the same for things like movies and TV shows, and software (Windows, anyone?) for that matter: knowing that the consumer DOES NOT WANT the whole package, we're forced to buy it anyway. It's called 'tied-selling' and in many industries is illegal.
When content creators lose their monopoly-ish controls on their markets (textbooks, cds, software, anything), or they start actually selling me what I want, and ONLY what I want.. then I'd be happy to purchase from them.
In the meantime, call it immoral/illegal/whatever. I'll still be downloading mp3s, and photocopying books from the library.
Most of what you said can basically be summed up in one sentence:
An entire day of a human life could be recorded in perfect detail (with no compression) on a 120 GB disk.
Let me guess - you're using roughly the bitrate of DVD, extrapolating over 24 hours, and fudging the numbers. Well, either you or whoever came up with this figure.
Let's look at this from a cocktail napkin perspective. At the CURRENT resolution and audio sampling rate etc for DVD, 24 hours is about 50GB of storage. Only problem is, this assumes that DVD catches every single bit of visual/audio information that is out there. Well, just ask your dog how well 44Khz records high pitched noises. And then remember that not everyone has as poor eyesight/hearing as the masses. So even fudging this number by a factor of 2 or 3 starts to hit and overtake 120GB.
Oh wait, this assumes that all we care about is what the eyes see and the ears hear. Too bad that things are happening all around you. Also too bad that you have 3 other external senses, plus several other internal ones (balance comes to mind) that are continually inputting data into your brain.
Estimates like this really make me shake my head, as they assume artificial limitations that just aren't there in the real, ANALOG world.
.. what can be attributed to stupidity. (OK, so sue me if I paraphrase).
I thought MI was a really topical film; did anyone else notice the Rolling Blackouts headline on the newspaper (obviously a recent addition to the film), or the parallels with Anthrax investigations (when "decontaminating" clothes & buildings from children)?
I think you're reading far too much into things here. Keeping in mind that most of the entire plot would make no sense if it WASN'T for the Monsters' energy crisis, and their insane fear of 'our' world... well, these 2 items that you mentioned were pretty obviously included from the start. They may have embellished a bit due to recent events, but keep in mind that these types of movies can take years to make. You certainly don't re-write major plot points only a month before release.
History has shown that any console system that uses standard media is easily hacked and pirate games can be distributed
Um.. until very recently, there *were* no console systems that could be pirated. Even the first cd-rom based systems were fairly safe, as very few folks had burners in the early 1990's. Unless you're counting the several dozen "100-in-1" NES cartridges, pirated games have never been much of an issue until the Playstation. Which makes me wonder about your next point...
While its true that non-standard formats like Dreamcast's GDROM and Nintendo's own cartridge formats are also piratable, the amount of knowledge and/or effort required to do so is generally much higher.
The Dreamcast is one of the EASIEST systems to pirate, at least for the average person. Its GD-ROM format didn't save it in the least. And Nintendo's systems of the past few years have consistently had flashrom/cd-rom hardware available for them, if you order through Hong Kong.
In fact, other than the Playstation and Dreamcast, there really have been no hugely pirated systems. And we all know just how much piracy has hurt the Playstation (still selling for over $100, 6 years -or is it 7 now- after release).
Not to sound like a troll, but shouldn't an 'experienced UNIX programmer' generally have the requisite skills to look up 'i love you virus' in Google, read that it only affects Outlook, and move on? I think a bigger problem is people's unwillingness to RESEARCH a problem themselves.
And over at Redmond..
on
The New Zelda
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Nintendo, there better not be any annoying talking fairy following Link around the whole damn time!
Microsoft, following in the inspired footsteps of Nintendo, is adding Clippy(tm) as a sidekick to each of its game titles.
Their first racing demo shows just how much Clippy(tm) enhances a gamer's experience:
You have pressed the 'GAS' and 'BRAKE' buttons at the same time. Do you want to: go faster? go slower? drive into the fully 3d-rendered crowd of spectators?
When asked why so many gamers who have tested Tomb RaiderX have cramped thumbs, a Microsoft spokesman's only comment was 'apparently, some kids thought it would be funny to shoot at Clippy(tm). What they didn't realize is that our beta-testers had already done the same thing incessantly, so we've re-designed the game to make this feat impossible. After all, how could you complete any game without the aid of Clippy(tm)?'
What really steams me is the people who don't think they can 'afford' broadband, or just plain wont pay the extra few pennies for it. These people deserve our wrath and then some.
Case in point: my boss. His home account is AOL (surprise). He pays $26.00 a month for this, which he continually has problems with (insert long list of issues as to why the modern world hates dial-up). A cable or DSL account would cost him $40.00. 50 cents a day extra, for the speed, for the convenience, for the hassles of winmodems being taken away (this from a man who paid over $100 a month EXTRA on his car lease just to get a car with leather seating).
3 years of me trying, and I still get the Friday @ 10pm calls 'it says the line is busy. what do I do?'.
Oh, did I happen to mention that his PC is plugged into his SECOND phone line, which costs him something like $20.00 a month on top? His reasoning for keeping it is that if anyone has to call him when the main line is busy... and yes, this is a man who will actually exceed his monthly allotment of AOL hours (I think it's 100 or so:)
Beyond the cool factor, listening to far-away radio stations is pretty mundane for me, thanks to this little thing called the internet:)
I'd be much more interested in just how far south the Northern Lights are showing up over the next day or two... up here at 50deg N, we seem them all the time.
Parts of speech and certain computer and gadget connectors - these have genders.
I don't recall English having any gender issues. All the crazy continental european languages though.. I always wondered in French class just who decided that all cats are female and all dogs are male:)
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't the eventual goal to have "average Joes" go to space?
Yes, and considering NO average Joes will go until a LOT of rich folks do (think cars, airplanes, etc, etc, etc)... I'd say it is NOT going to happen overnight.
Howabout the countless claims made every year by (puts on asbestos suit) women who wear high heels and then slip on icy surfaces? Up here in Canada, I'm sorry, but you have to be a complete moron to try spike heels outdoors in January. The claimant usually wins these, by the way.
But just to keep this on topic, am I the only one who thinks that news organizations should be required by law to insert one simple sentence into their stories: "DO NOT OPEN EMAIL ATTACHMENTS". Oh wait, then they wouldn't have a story for next time this happened.
Besides the fact that you just aligned some vague concepts with some more vague concepts, without explaining yourself, there's really nothing scary here at all. The term 'strikes back' is a common english idiom, and was rather natural for CNN et al to use.
However, just for the record, 'rebels' never drove around in landspeeders, and Luke was neither a suicidal pilot, nor was he attacking a weapon capable of blowing up planets...
Ben Kenobi / Osama? When did 'gentle Ben' ever advocate killing millions of innocent Empire civilians? Star Wars episode 4.5: Ben Gets Pissed?
Pull out an atlas sometime. China is about as close to the middle east as England is.
Well, the Olsen twins managed to play a child of about 4 years old well into their early teen years. Although how they plan on making one of them male is beyond me (not that any self-respecting geek would care, c'mon, these are the OLSEN TWINS!).
Ask any priest, rabbi, reverand, etc, etc, etc...
:)
If you have already purchased (or have been given) an Xbox or a PS2, simply bring it outside of a video game store, with a sledgehammer, and tell everyone how boring, crappy, and slow the system is, and how you are not going to give Bill Gates any more of your money. Then smash it to fucking bits.
Just so you know, Bill Gates doesn't make a cent off of SONY'S PS2. Not one.
Yes, and IBM made PCs years ago. Now, they're faster/run different operating systems/come in translucent cases. Big deal.
Then again, I never *have* understood the point of posting a message that basically says "your site sucks". If you don't like it, please leave. Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.
If some mining company sets up shop there, we can whine all we want, but unless the US/Russia/China/UN/whoever can either a)stop the mining operation through force on the moon itself, or b)stop those in charge here on Earth... well, ownership suddenly amounts to squat.
Of course, for an Earth-run mining operation it should be easy enough to arrest those responsible, if we want to ignore the complete lack of laws in the matter.
What'll be more interesting is if someone manages to set up a self-sustaining lunar colony. Guess what? That person(s) would completely own the moon, carte blanche. Unless of course we were willing to nuke them off the surface of the moon, or fight some sort of inter-planetary war. Otherwise, seeing as there's nothing that can be done about it.. they own it by defauly. That's pretty much how countries exist on Earth, anyway.
To find out, take the number of Americans who live in trailer parks with a cross-section of those who think that Vince McMahon is god. That's your anti-moon people.
The rest of humanity (or at least those capable of high school physics) would be the pro-moon people.
I'm not quite sure what the point of your post was, but assuming you think that online voting is a bad thing because of the above... well sir/ma'am, I guess we should outlaw telephones, too. They've been used countless times to defraud people who should know better into giving up personal information.
Then again, these days ignorance IS a legitimate excuse for stupidity. Sigh...
The problem is, and of course the word 'relativity' is supposed to clue you in to this, is that the Earth is also moving away from you at near light speeds. So, 100 years might elapse for you while on Earth they only perceive 10 minutes.
Tricky shit.
In my day, we called them horseless carriages. You may know them better as 'automobiles' or 'cars'.
Look them up sometime, they revolutionized the industrial world sometime around ought-nine or so.
Seemingly natural event, man-made cause
The same issue with CDs: for years I've hated to buy an album just for one or two songs. I could say the same for things like movies and TV shows, and software (Windows, anyone?) for that matter: knowing that the consumer DOES NOT WANT the whole package, we're forced to buy it anyway. It's called 'tied-selling' and in many industries is illegal.
When content creators lose their monopoly-ish controls on their markets (textbooks, cds, software, anything), or they start actually selling me what I want, and ONLY what I want.. then I'd be happy to purchase from them.
In the meantime, call it immoral/illegal/whatever. I'll still be downloading mp3s, and photocopying books from the library.
An entire day of a human life could be recorded in perfect detail (with no compression) on a 120 GB disk.
Let me guess - you're using roughly the bitrate of DVD, extrapolating over 24 hours, and fudging the numbers. Well, either you or whoever came up with this figure.
Let's look at this from a cocktail napkin perspective. At the CURRENT resolution and audio sampling rate etc for DVD, 24 hours is about 50GB of storage. Only problem is, this assumes that DVD catches every single bit of visual/audio information that is out there. Well, just ask your dog how well 44Khz records high pitched noises. And then remember that not everyone has as poor eyesight/hearing as the masses. So even fudging this number by a factor of 2 or 3 starts to hit and overtake 120GB.
Oh wait, this assumes that all we care about is what the eyes see and the ears hear. Too bad that things are happening all around you. Also too bad that you have 3 other external senses, plus several other internal ones (balance comes to mind) that are continually inputting data into your brain.
Estimates like this really make me shake my head, as they assume artificial limitations that just aren't there in the real, ANALOG world.
I thought MI was a really topical film; did anyone else notice the Rolling Blackouts headline on the newspaper (obviously a recent addition to the film), or the parallels with Anthrax investigations (when "decontaminating" clothes & buildings from children)?
I think you're reading far too much into things here. Keeping in mind that most of the entire plot would make no sense if it WASN'T for the Monsters' energy crisis, and their insane fear of 'our' world... well, these 2 items that you mentioned were pretty obviously included from the start. They may have embellished a bit due to recent events, but keep in mind that these types of movies can take years to make. You certainly don't re-write major plot points only a month before release.
Um.. until very recently, there *were* no console systems that could be pirated. Even the first cd-rom based systems were fairly safe, as very few folks had burners in the early 1990's. Unless you're counting the several dozen "100-in-1" NES cartridges, pirated games have never been much of an issue until the Playstation. Which makes me wonder about your next point...
While its true that non-standard formats like Dreamcast's GDROM and Nintendo's own cartridge formats are also piratable, the amount of knowledge and/or effort required to do so is generally much higher.
The Dreamcast is one of the EASIEST systems to pirate, at least for the average person. Its GD-ROM format didn't save it in the least. And Nintendo's systems of the past few years have consistently had flashrom/cd-rom hardware available for them, if you order through Hong Kong.
In fact, other than the Playstation and Dreamcast, there really have been no hugely pirated systems. And we all know just how much piracy has hurt the Playstation (still selling for over $100, 6 years -or is it 7 now- after release).
And why precisely would it be used to prosecute teen fathers?
Or is there a huge population of unknowing teen mothers out there that just accidentally got pregnant, through no fault of their own?
Microsoft, following in the inspired footsteps of Nintendo, is adding Clippy(tm) as a sidekick to each of its game titles.
Their first racing demo shows just how much Clippy(tm) enhances a gamer's experience:
When asked why so many gamers who have tested Tomb RaiderX have cramped thumbs, a Microsoft spokesman's only comment was 'apparently, some kids thought it would be funny to shoot at Clippy(tm). What they didn't realize is that our beta-testers had already done the same thing incessantly, so we've re-designed the game to make this feat impossible. After all, how could you complete any game without the aid of Clippy(tm)?'
Case in point: my boss. His home account is AOL (surprise). He pays $26.00 a month for this, which he continually has problems with (insert long list of issues as to why the modern world hates dial-up). A cable or DSL account would cost him $40.00. 50 cents a day extra, for the speed, for the convenience, for the hassles of winmodems being taken away (this from a man who paid over $100 a month EXTRA on his car lease just to get a car with leather seating).
3 years of me trying, and I still get the Friday @ 10pm calls 'it says the line is busy. what do I do?'.
Oh, did I happen to mention that his PC is plugged into his SECOND phone line, which costs him something like $20.00 a month on top? His reasoning for keeping it is that if anyone has to call him when the main line is busy... and yes, this is a man who will actually exceed his monthly allotment of AOL hours (I think it's 100 or so :)
I'd be much more interested in just how far south the Northern Lights are showing up over the next day or two... up here at 50deg N, we seem them all the time.
I don't recall English having any gender issues. All the crazy continental european languages though.. I always wondered in French class just who decided that all cats are female and all dogs are male :)
I'd personally start with density myself. They know there's something heavy down there, and the most logical choice being iron (?).